“This Day Published…Mr. Bates and his Horses”?

Two hundred fifty years ago today, on 18 Oct 1773, the Boston Post-Boy published this advertisement:

THIS DAY PUBLISHED,
And to be SOLD at the New Printing-Office
in Hanover-street, Boston,
A Pamphlet, entitled,
Mr. Bates and his Horses,
Weighed in the Balance.

In which is shewn, with great Brevity, that his Exhibitions in Boston, are impoverishing, disgraceful to human Nature, and downright Breaches of the Sixth Commandment.

OH BE A MAN! Young.

This was very similar to the advertisements that had appeared back on 27 September, as previously quoted. The big difference is that the first ad had started, “In a few Days will be published…”

The 17 October was even more similar to an ad in the Post-Boy on 4 October, and again on 11 October. In fact, those three notices were all identical. And they all said that “Mr. Bates and his Horses” was published that day. The text never shifted over to say “Now available” or any other phrasing to indicate the pamphlet was already off the press.

Combined with how no printed copy of “Bates and His Horses Weighed in the Balance” has survived, nor any mention of it in writings of the time, that repeated advertisement raises the question of whether that screed was actually ever printed.

Nathaniel Mills and John Hicks, printers of the Boston Post-Boy since April, could have sold ad space for a certain number of weeks and kept the type in place for each new issue of the paper until that time ran out. If they didn’t hear from their client about updating the wording, they had no strong motive to quibble with it.

On the other hand, Joseph Greenleaf, proprietor of the printing office on Hanover Street, would probably have wanted some payment before investing time and paper in the pamphlet. With Jacob Bates heading out of town in early October, public interest in his moral standing probably dried up.

But we can’t be sure. Perhaps some author really had a lot to say about Bates’s equestrian exhibition and did pay to have it printed, only for no one else to care enough to preserve the result. People could always find a use for scraps of rag linen paper.

Smithsonian’s Phillis Wheatley Peters Collection Now Online

Last month the National Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., announced the acquisition of the Phillis Wheatley Peters Collection of materials related to the Revolutionary-era poet.

The unique jewel in this collection is the poem “Ocean” in the poet’s own handwriting. This was one of the poems listed for Phillis Peters’s second collection in 1781, but during the war that announcement didn’t attract enough subscriptions for the book to be printed.

The manuscript of that collection is lost, but some individual poems survive. “Ocean” was first published in 1998. Scholars speculate that Phillis Wheatley wrote it during her third transatlantic crossing 250 years ago as she came back from London.

The collection of thirty objects includes six published in Wheatley’s lifetime, including:

• her collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
• short items that her publisher placed in the May 1773 Gentleman’s Magazine ahead of publication.
• the December 1774 issue of the Royal American Magazine, published in Boston by Joseph Greenleaf, printing “To a Gentleman of the Navy.”
• A shortened version of “On the Death of a Child” printed in the Rev. John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine in 1781.

Other items show Wheatley’s legacy as an author and a symbol of African-American achievement:

• Isaiah Thomas’s 1791 proposal to reprint Wheatley’s first collection with additional material, also unsuccessful.
• reprints of individual poems in the early 1800s. 
• scholarly studies.
• a booklet issued by the Phillis Wheatley Club of Waycross, Georgia, a women’s club, in 1930, shown above.

All of that material is already digitized and available for viewing on the Smithsonian’s website and through the Digital Public Library of America.

“BATES and his HORSES Weighed in the Balance”

The same 27 Sept 1773 newspapers that ran Jacob Bates’s latest advertisements about his equestrian show at the foot of the Mall in Boston, as quoted yesterday, also ran advertisements for a new publication:

In a few Days will be published, and sold at the Printing-Office in Hanover-street, Boston,
A Pamphlet, entitled,
BATES and his HORSES
Weighed in the Balance.

In which is shewn, with great Brevity, that his Exhibitions in Boston, are impoverishing, disgraceful to human Nature, and downright Breaches of the Sixth Commandment.

OH BE A MAN! Young.

The Sixth Commandment, in Hebrew and Protestant numbering, is the one that forbids murder.

The words “Oh be a man!” came from Edward Young’s The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742), where they appear twice:

Oh, be a man! and thou shalt be a god!
And half self-made!—Ambition how divine!
. . .
Oh! be a man;—and strive to be a god.
“For what? (thou say’st)—to damp the joys of life?”
No; to give heart and substance to thy joys.

Or that phrase might just have been an allusion to Bates’s self-vaunted “Horsemanship” and “Variety of manly Exercises.”

Exactly what the poetic tag meant, and how performing tricks on horses was tantamount to murder, was presumably clearer in the published pamphlet. Except that no copy of that pamphlet has survived.

As Carl Robert Keyes’s Adverts 250 points out, the print shop on Hanover Street belonged to Joseph Greenleaf, an active Whig. That doesn’t mean the pamphlet reflected his own views, however; Greenleaf may well have taken on the job at the customer’s expense.

It’s also possible this pamphlet was never actually published. The advertisement for it ran in two newspapers, but only on that one Monday and never again. It appears to have reflected many New Englanders’ distrust of theatrics of all kinds—and yet Jacob Bates continued to perform.

TOMORROW: A clergyman at the exhibition.

Exploring the Sid Lapidus Collection Online

Princeton University announced this month that alumnus Sidney Lapidus had completed the gift of a large collection of pamphlets and other political material from the broadly defined Revolutionary Era.

Lapidus started his collection in 1959 as a recent graduate, well before entering what turned out to be the rewarding field of private equity. He first bought a copy of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man from a London bookshop. (Paine’s cottage in New Rochelle, New York, was across the street from Lapidus’s high school.)

The Sid Lapidus ’59 Collection on Liberty and the American Revolution at Princeton now includes “more than 2,700 original books, atlases, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines relating to human and political rights, liberty, and independence around the time of the American Revolution.”

In addition, Lapidus provided funds to digitize the material and make the collection keyword-searchable for anyone.

I tried out the site by asking to see all the material that used the phrase “Intolerable Acts.” That search produced several hits, but the phrase didn’t appear in the original texts, only in the dealers’ descriptions and other metadata attached to those items. As I wrote years ago, the phrase “Intolerable Acts” didn’t become widely used until the late 1800s.

One writer in Revolutionary America who used the word “intolerable” a lot was the Rev. Thomas Bradbury Chandler, author of A Free Examination of the Critical Commentary on Archbishop Secker’s Letter to Mr. Walpole, published by Hugh Gaine of New York in 1774. Chandler was a Loyalist, and what he found intolerable wasn’t a stricter Parliament but the “Hardship” of an ocean voyage, the “Licentiousness” of a totally free press, and the writer he was responding to.

I also searched for all material published in 1774 and mentioning Boston. That brought up the official texts of Parliament’s new Coercive Acts, the responses from the First Continental Congress, sermons and almanacs with commentary on current events, and so on.

One item that caught my eyes was A Letter to a Friend. Giving a Concise, But Just, Representation of the Hardships and Sufferings the Town of Boston is Exposed to and Must Undergo in Consequence of the Late Act of the British-Parliament; Which, by Shutting Up It’s Port, Has Put a Fatal Bar in the Way of that Commercial Business on which it Depended for It’s Support, published by Joseph Greenleaf.

That pamphlet from the summer of 1774 is signed “T.W. A Bostonian.” However, it was widely known that the author was the Rev. Dr. Charles Chauncy. Usually ministers stayed out of secular political disputes, preferring to work behind the scenes or through sermons, but Chauncy felt no compunction when the economic well-being of his town was in danger.

On page 22 of this pamphlet Chauncy embarked on a long footnote complaining about a Customs service policy that required firewood ships signing into Marblehead to completely unload and reload before going on to Boston. So he really was writing about earthly concerns.

Now the text of this Letter to a Friend is already scanned and transcribed on the web. So the arrival of this digital version from Princeton isn’t a revelation. But anything that makes research easier is welcome.

TOMORROW: Charles Chauncy’s friends.

The Mystery of “Mucius Scævola”

Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy started to publish the essays of “Mucius Scævola” on 30 May 1771, four months after Joseph Greenleaf advertised his property in Abington for sale.

That summer there was a dispute over which Boston printer got the contract to publish the graduating Harvard class’s theses—Richard Draper of the established and government-friendly Boston News-Letter or Thomas of the Spy. Thomas won, which sparked a little newspaper war. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts published a whole article about that dispute, which it’s made available here.

On 8 Aug 1771 the News-Letter offered an essay which described the men behind “the dirty Spy” this way:

What a wretched Triumvirate! a poor shiftless erratic Knight from Abington, a dunghill-bred Journeyman Typographer, and a stupid phrensical Mountebank

Thomas was the “Typographer.” The “Mountebank” was almost certainly Dr. Thomas Young, who many people agreed was writing for the Spy under the name “Leonidas” and was well known for this enthusiasms in both medicine and politics. And the “Knight from Abington” could only be Joseph Greenleaf—it wasn’t that big a town.

The 15 August Spy carried a couple of replies. One insisted that “neither Joseph Greenleaf, Esq; Doctor Thomas Young, nor Mr. Isaiah Thomas” had been involved in composing a statement from the graduating Harvard students. But that’s different from denying that those men were connected to the Spy. In fact, Greenleaf and Thomas had become business partners of some sort.

Another reply in the same issue addressed three pseudonymous or anonymous News-Letter essayists this way:

If by ridiculing and sneering at my character, and maliciously defaming me; you think you have offered a sacrifice of a sweet smelling favour in the nostrils of his Excellency [Gov. Thomas Hutchinson], you may possibly be mistaken; he too well knows your views, he also knows that “Nero’s flatterers, were Nero’s assassins.”

I have one favour to ask of you, that is, that you would not lurk priv’ly to take away my reputation; act like veterans; take the field in open day-light, and to use the language of the Cantabrigian, “Lie on,” make yourselves what mirth you please at my expence, bury none of your talents at defamation, only let the world know your names; subscribe your future productions, and let mankind judge of the truth of the charges by the credibility of the accusers of

J. GREENLEAF

In his article “Tag-Team Polemics,” published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1995, Neil L. York wrote that this was one of three times that Greenleaf denied having anything to do with the “Mucius Scævola” essays.

That’s not how I read Greenleaf’s reply. He wasn’t denying anything, except that his opponents’ attacks would win them favor with the governor. He challenged his opponents to drop their anonymity. Sure, it would be hypocritical to issue that challenge while continuing to publish under a pseudonym, but Greenleaf didn’t confirm or deny he was “Mucius Scævola.”

Likewise, the other two “denials” never really denied that connection. On 22 November, as I quoted yesterday, Greenleaf disingenuously said that he couldn’t imagine why he had received a summons from the Council after “Mucius Scævola” called the governor a “USURPER.” In the 13 Jan 1772 Boston Gazette, Greenleaf went further in an addendum to a letter about the whole controversy:

P. S. A secret has leaked out, it is said, it was my duty as a magistrate, to have prevented the publication of the Piece signed Mucius Scævola! But I have no such connections with Mr. Thomas or any other Printer, as give me a right to restrain him or them in any publication, though I must confess, that if I had power to restrain the Press, I should have no inclination to hinder Mucius, or even Chronus, or Impavidus, from laying their sentiments before the public.

Greenleaf thus denied “connections with Mr. Thomas”—but only connections which would give him legal authority as a justice of the peace to restrain the press. We know he really was in business with Thomas.

In that postscript Greenleaf wrote of “Mucius” in a way that implied the writer was separate from himself. Likewise, in a 2 Jan 1772 essay in the Spy “Mucius Scævola” reproached Gov. Hutchinson for how he had treated “J. Greenleaf, Esq”:

I argued this point with you in a former paper, and you summoned Mr. Justice Greenleaf to appear before you in council to answer to it. He knew you had again gone beyond your last, and treated your summons as it deserved.

Those remarks certainly imply that Greenleaf didn’t want to be identified as “Mucius Scævola,” but they’re not direct denials.

In Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts, Richard D. Brown accepted the implication of Greenleaf’s Gazette postscript and wrote that the governor went after him because he “had made no attempt to suppress an inflammatory piece by [Dr. Joseph] Warren in Isaiah Thomas’ Spy.” I suspect that mixes up the 1771 controversy with the similar dispute over one of Warren’s essays in 1768, which I noted here. In his recent biography of Warren, Samuel Forman took Brown’s opening to ascribe all the “Mucius Scævola” essays to Warren. I’m not convinced by that reading of the evidence.

Rather, I think Greenleaf’s replies show how carefully he avoided making a direct statement about whether he was “Mucius Scævola.” He played dumb about why the Council would want to see him. He fudged his connection with Thomas. He challenged his opponents to give up their anonymity first. But he never stated that he hadn’t written the essay everyone was talking about, which he could have done at any time if he were really being unjustly accused. Anyone observing political interviews today can see him silently sidestepping the big question he didn’t want to answer.

It’s true that we have no claim from either Greenleaf or Thomas (shown above in old age) that Greenleaf wrote as “Mucius Scævola.” But neither did they or any contemporary ever name someone else as that writer. Thomas did acknowledge that Greenleaf became his partner in some ventures and wrote effective political essays. If those weren’t the “Mucius Scævola” pieces in the Spy, where are they?

The Abington Resolves that Greenleaf penned in 1770 declared that Parliament’s new laws were “a mere nullity” because they didn’t come from proper authority. “Mucius Scævola” called the governor’s decrees “null and void” for the same reason. And in his January 1772 response over his own name, Greenleaf declared the Council’s summons “WHOLLY illegal” and not worth “paying any obedience to.” That was his go-to argument.

Hutchinson and other supporters of the royal government were convinced that Greenleaf was “Mucius Scævola,” even if they couldn’t prove it. For almost two centuries, historians accepted that assessment. No one before Brown ascribed those essays to Dr. Warren. Even York, while writing that Greenleaf denied authorship, treated him as “Mucius Scævola.” And unless more evidence turns up, I’m giving him credit, too.

Joseph Greenleaf and “the Council-chamber in Boston”

On 16 Nov 1771, the day after Joseph Greenleaf declined to meet with Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and the Massachusetts Council (on the understandable grounds that his teen-aged son was dying), the Council issued a formal summons for him:

You are required to appear before the Governor and Council, at the Council-chamber in Boston, on Tuesday the tenth day of December next, at ten of the clock in the forenoon, then and there to be examined touching a certain paper called The Massachusetts Spy, published the fourteenth day of November, 1771; whereof you are not to fail at your peril.

Greenleaf’s name didn’t actually appear in that issue of the Spy. The essay that angered the governor was signed “Mucius Scævola,” and Hutchinson was convinced that was Greenleaf’s pen name.

In an article in the 13 Jan 1772 Boston Gazette, Greenleaf laid out his response:

This proceeding alarmed me, as I judged it WHOLLY illegal, for I could have no idea of the legality of erecting a court of INQUISITION in this free country, and could find no form for such a citation in the province law books: My duty to my country therefore forbad my paying any obedience to it, especially as it might hereafter be used as a precedent.

I should be very unwilling to be thought a despiser of the laws of my country, I religiously submit to them all, “not only for wrath, but for conscience sake.” [Romans 13:5] I have not such a mistaken notion of liberty, as to think it consists in a freedom from obligation either to the laws of nature or of the laws of the land: But the freedom I now contend for is, a right of resistance, or rather withholding my obedience, when unlawfully commanded.

Greenleaf had the summons printed in the 22 November Massachusetts Spy. “I know not the design of it, nor why it is sent to me rather than to any body else,” he wrote. That and other Whig newspapers began to run essays in support of him.

On 10 December, Greenleaf didn’t go to the Town House as demanded. (The empty Council Chamber appears above, courtesy of the Old State House Museum.)

The Council minutes for that date therefore stated:

His Excellency having acquainted the Board at their last meeting, that Joseph Greenleaf, Esq; a Justice of the Peace for the county of Plymouth, was generally reputed to be concerned with Isaiah Thomas, in printing and publishing a News-Paper, called the Massachusetts Spy, and the said Joseph Greenleaf having thereupon been summoned to attend the board on this day, in order to his examination touching the same, and not attending according to summons, it was thereupon unanimously advised, that the said Joseph Greenleaf be dismissed from the office of a Justice of the Peace, which advice was approved of and consented to by his Excellency, and the said Joseph Greenleaf is dismissed from the said office accordingly.

That notice was printed in the newspapers. Hutchinson had found a way to punish someone for the essay that called his a “USURPER,” even if he had to take a roundabout route to that result.

Greenleaf’s response in the Boston Gazette was a legal argument that royal commissions couldn’t be repealed that way:

…if a Justice of the Peace may be dismissed from his office, because he refuses to be examined about a common News-Paper by any Court, but one legally impowered to summon and examine him, if he may be dismissed, because he is “supposed by people in general” to be concerned with a Printer, or any other person, that the governor has conceived a dislike to, we are in a pitiable case.

Greenleaf went on to say that losing the job of magistrate “gives me no uneasiness, for by leaving the County where I had jurisdiction [Plymouth], I voluntarily relinquished it.” Yet he insisted, “I still have jurisdiction when I please to take my seat on the bench at the Court of Sessions.” So he wasn’t fired—he quit. And he could take that back any time.

TOMORROW: Was Greenleaf really “Mucius Scævola”?

The Unusual Ambitions of Joseph Greenleaf

As I quoted back here, on 14 Nov 1771 the Massachusetts Spy published an essay signed “Mucius Scævola” that called Gov. Thomas Hutchinson a “USURPER,” which was at least close to sedition. After some effort, the governor convinced his Council to respond to that essay.

That body didn’t summon just Isaiah Thomas, the newspaper’s printer. They also sent a message to Joseph Greenleaf, who in January had put his “30 Acres of choice Land” and “handsome Dwelling-House” in Abington up for sale and moved into Boston—to devote more time to the press.

That was an extraordinary action for an eighteenth-century gentleman. British society had an established social ladder. Journeymen aspired to become independent craftsmen with prosperous workshops, no longer managed by another man. Independent craftsmen aspired to become merchants arranging lucrative ventures, no longer working with their hands. Merchants aspired to become landed gentlemen overseeing large farms, no longer subject to the vagaries of trade because their fortune was now in “real estate.”

Furthermore, British society still considered printing a craft, not a gentleman’s profession. Printers literally got their hands dirty, after all. Even writing for publication was less than genteel. Most upper-class authors published anonymously or under pseudonyms, though their neighbors and rivals often knew the real identities behind those pen names. All told, giving up a rural estate in order to go into publishing looked like a step or two down the social ladder.

When 1770 began, Greenleaf was a country squire—a big man in Abington. He was a justice of the peace for Plymouth County. His had married Abigail Paine, older sister of Robert Treat Paine, thus allying him with some other genteel families in southeastern Massachusetts.

But Greenleaf got excited about Massachusetts’s resistance to Parliament’s new policies. He drafted sixteen resolutions that his town adopted two weeks after the Boston Massacre, laying out a political philosophy that started with “a state of nature” and went on to reject any new taxes “passed in either of the Parliaments of France, Spain, or England” as “a mere nullity”—a striking way of saying that the legislature in London had no authority over the people of Massachusetts.

Abington’s resolutions were published widely. The Essex Gazette ran a letter from New York that said:

The Resolves of those illustrious, and immortal Friends to the RIGHTS OF MEN—The Abington Resolves, have given their Brethren here, INFINITE PLEASURE, and I imagine some others as much Pain.

The same paper also ran a letter from London:

The Abington Resolves are too flaming and rash. They are rather like the transient flashes of passion, than the cool, steady, equal flame of patriotism and liberty…

Either way, Greenleaf seems to have been hooked on imperial political debate. Abington became too small for him.

In 1771, as I said, Greenleaf moved into Boston. What’s more, he made some sort of deal with Isaiah Thomas, the young printer of the Massachusetts Spy. It’s not clear what their arrangement was because the culture of the time didn’t have the occupational category of “publisher”—i.e., someone who finances and manages the printing and selling of a periodical or books without actually operating the press.

The Council stated in December that Greenleaf “was generally reputed to be concerned with Isaiah Thomas, in printing and publishing a News-Paper, called the Massachusett’s Spy.” The following year, the Censor magazine, set up to support the royal government, said Greenleaf was “reputed…to be in Co-Partnership with Mr. Thomas.”

In October 1772, Greenleaf himself advertised that he “carries on the Printing Business with E. Russell.” But that was a footnote to an announcement that he had opened “A STORE, INTELLIGENCE-OFFICE, and VENDUE ROOM,” or auction house, selling imported goods, cloth, “Bristol Beer,” and more. He was presenting himself mainly as an import merchant, with the printing as a side business.

A lot of people then and since nonetheless referred to Greenleaf as a “printer.” I doubt he set type or worked the levers on the press (as demonstrated above by Gary Gregory of the modern Edes & Gill Print Shop). But he definitely worked with Thomas to publish the Spy and later the Royal American Magazine, probably by putting up money and writing and editing copy. In between those ventures he also funded work in Russell’s shop (but not the Censor, both the magazine and Greenleaf were anxious to assure people).

Because of his financial interest in the Spy, Gov. Hutchinson and the Council summoned Greenleaf to discuss the “Mucius Scævola” essay. According to Greenleaf:

On the 15th of November last [i.e., in 1771] I received a polite message from the Governor and Council, by Mr. Baker, desiring my attendance at the Council Chamber, this I have no fault to find with: The distress of my family, on account of a sick child, who died that day, was such that I could not possibly attend, and I excused myself in the most polite manner I was capable of.

Indeed, the 18 November Boston Evening-Post ran a death notice for “Mr. Joseph Greenleaf, jun, in the 18th Year of his Age, Son of Joseph Greenleaf, Esq.”

But Gov. Hutchinson wasn’t satisfied with Greenleaf’s excuse for not coming to the Council chamber. Because he didn’t think the man was simply Thomas’s partner in putting out the Spy. He believed that Greenleaf was “Mucius Scævola.”

TOMORROW: Greenleaf’s claims.

Thomas Hutchinson as “a monster in government”

You might think that getting through November meant the end of the saga of Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s controversial 1771 Thanksgiving proclamation. But he wasn’t that lucky, and neither are we.

On 14 November the actual holiday was still a week away, but the controversy was at its height in newspapers and meetinghouses. Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy published this essay from one of its regular contributors:

If it be true, that the exceptionable clause in the late proclamation, was not proposed by Mr. Hutchinson, but by ONE of the council; yet there it stands, and is nevertheless exceptionable, and must reflect dishonor somewhere, even though it were inadvertently inserted.

It is not denied, even by Mr. Hutchinson’s friends, that the other part of the proclamation was drafted by him: We may consider him then as triumphing over us as SLAVES, or persons who have no priviledges; and though we well knew it would be a piece of mockery, to lead us to the throne of grace, with thanksgivings, for the preservation of privileges, which, by his means, in part, we have been deprived of; yet he thought fit, with the advice of six, out of twenty-eight of his council. (if by HIS CRAFT, could make it their act) to insert it.

We have need of the wisdom of serpents, who are concerned with such rulers; to be considered by them as fools, is irritating; for fools they must think us, if they can imagine that we can complain of loss of liberty in one breath, and with the next solemnly thank God for the preservation of it. What account can be given for such conduct, consistent with common honesty, mankind must judge.

It would give me pain to harbour one thought, that the six members, who it is said voted for the insertion of that impious paragraph, intended thereby to curry favour with the ministry; I cannot indulge such a thought, besides there is no danger that this people will ever receive a council appointed by the KING himself: And certainly it is unlikely, that if the representatives of this people should once adopt such a sentiment of them, that these men should ever again be re-chosen into the council. Mr. Hutchinson may think we are easy, because we have for so long waited for a redress of grievances; but our patience is nearly exhausted. It cannot be that we shall hear much longer, to have our money forced from us.—

(It’s interesting to read that argument about the Council while looking ahead to the popular response to the Massachusetts Government Act of 1774, which created just what this essay said the people of the province wouldn’t stand—“a council appointed by the KING himself.”)

An Englishman should never part with a penny but by his consent, or the consent of his agent, or representative, especially as the money thus forced from us, is to hire a man to TYRANNIZE over us, whom his Master calls our Governor. This seems to be Mr. Hutchinson’s situation; therefore I cannot but view him as a usurper, and absolutely deny his jurisdiction over this people; and am of opinion, that any act of assembly consented to by him, in his pretended capacity as Governor, is ipso facto, null and void, and consequently, not binding upon us. A ruler, independent on the people, is a monster in government; and such a one is Mr. Hutchinson; and such would George the third be, if he should be rendered independent on the people of Great-Britain

A Massachusetts Governor, the King by compact, with this people may nominate and appoint, but not pay. For this support, he must stipulate with the people, and until he does, he is no legal Governor; without this, if he undertakes to rule, he is a USURPER.

It is high time then, my countrymen, that this matter was enquired into, if we have no constitutional Governor, it is time we had one. If the pretended Governor, or Lieut. Governor, by being independent on us for their support, are rendered incapable of compleating acts of government, it is time, I say, that we had a lawful one to preside, or that the pretended Governors, were dismissed and PUNISHED as USURPERS, and that the council, according to the charter, should take upon themselves the government of this province.

MUCIUS SCÆVOLA.

This essay attacked Hutchinson personally as a “USURPER” and denied is authority as governor. It also explicitly stated that the king could be deposed on the same grounds, and that might have galvanized Hutchinson more than the attack on himself.

TOMORROW: The governor returns to his Council.

Publishing the 1771 Thanksgiving Proclamation

I’ve been considering Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s Thanksgiving proclamation in 1771, one of the many bones of contention in Revolutionary Boston. Hutchinson’s own account may have been accurate in the basics but it wasn’t in all details, so I’m doubling back into other sources, starting with the newspapers.

On 17 October the Boston News-Letter, the paper closest to the royal government, reported that Hutchinson would name 21 November as the holiday. The Monday papers, most in opposition to the governor or neutral, repeated that news. People wanted early notice to plan for the holiday.

Gov. Hutchinson didn’t issue his official proclamation until 23 October. He might well have been working on its text. Some people later said “ONE of the council” had proposed reinstating language from before 1761 about the province’s “civil and religious Rights and Liberties.” Harbottle Dorr wrote in his newspaper collection that this Councilor was “supposed to be Colo. [William] Brattle.”

In 1765 Brattle (shown above) had marched with Ebenezer Mackintosh against the Stamp Act. He was one of Gov. Francis Bernard’s biggest thorns on the Council. In the 1770s he moved closer to the royal prerogative party, eventually sealing his fate as a Loyalist by setting off the “Powder Alarm” of 1774. But in 1771 Brattle might have sincerely still felt he was a Whig and that his colleagues should be pleased by the new governor acknowledging traditional liberties in traditional phrasing. Hutchinson probably liked the idea of reestablishing normalcy.

The governor’s final text went to Richard Draper, the printer with the contract from the province and Council to issue such official announcements as broadsides. Draper also published the News-Letter, and the proclamation appeared in that newspaper on 24 October. The Boston Evening-Post, Boston Post-Boy, and Essex Gazette of Salem ran the text on their front pages the following week.

Notably, Gov. Hutchinson’s proclamation didn’t appear in Edes and Gill’s 28 October Boston Gazette or in either 24 October or 31 October issues of Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy. Those were the most radical newspapers in Boston. Their printers appear to have made a choice not to give any space to the governor’s proclamation.

Those newspapers ran another item of Council business instead—Hutchinson’s complaint about the Gazette publishing an essay by “Junius Americanus” (the Virginia-born London lobbyist Arthur Lee) that called province secretary Andrew Oliver a “perjured traitor.” The Spy also published another in a series of essays signed “Mucius Scaevola,” this one complaining about the governor, the Customs Commissioners, and Secretary of State Hillsborough all at once.

TOMORROW: The Whig objections to Gov. Hutchinson’s language.

The “Centinel” in the Spy

In 1799 the Massachusetts Historical Society published a history of newspapers in Boston and New England. Unsigned at the time, that article was later credited to the Rev. John Eliot. Among his comments:

At this time [1771], the Massachusetts Spy was growing into high repute; a more violent class of politicians filled this paper with their speculations than the whigs who wrote in the Boston Gazette, who were experienced statesmen, and had a particular object in view; to make people understand the nature of government, the rights of the colonies, the oppressions of Great-Britain, and the virtues necessary to promote social order with the principles of liberty.

A more disorganizing spirit prevailed among those who wrote for the Massachusetts Spy; and who were, most of them, young men of genius, without experience in business, or knowledge of the world; some of whom, perhaps, had no principles to actuate them; or were enthusiasts, if they had principles; and wanted judgment where their virtue did not fail.

Any one who reads a periodical work, styled the Centinel, in forty numbers, which was highly celebrated, and some other pieces of a similar nature, will now see that the same spirit and principles lead to a dissolution of all society, and like more modern publications, on equality and the rights of men [e.g., later works by Thomas Paine], are direct attacks at all authority and law; and being carried into effect, would have made confusion here, as they have since dissolved the governments, and desolated the fair fields of Europe.

The Massachusetts Spy was printed at Worcester during the war; it became a more useful and excellent paper, and did infinite service, in diffusing a knowledge of facts, and some of the best written pieces that have appeared in our American periodical publications.

Who wrote the “Centinel” essays in Spy? Printer Isaiah Thomas never revealed who gave him those essays, and Eliot apparently didn’t know. In fact, Eliot’s characterization of the Spy writers as “young men of genius, without experience in business, or knowledge of the world,” appears to have little foundation.

Most of the “Centinel” essays were about what the writer saw as abuses of the British constitution and law. In 1995, the M.H.S. published an essay by Neil L. York positing that the author was lawyer Josiah Quincy, Jr. York has since co-edited volumes of Quincy’s papers published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

The other leading polemicists publishing in the Spy appear to have been Joseph Greenleaf (1720-1810) as “Mucius Scaevola” and Dr. Thomas Young (1732-1777) as “Leonidas.” “Mucius” especially got under the royal authorities’ skin. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson tried to punish Greenleaf and try his printer Thomas for seditious libel, but the local grand jury refused to indict.

I’ll talk about these and other controversies of colonial Boston’s newspapers tonight at the Boston Public Library.

What Kind of Name for a Magazine was The Censor?

A while back I discussed whether Penelope Russell took over The Censor from her husband Ezekiel, or was simply his indispensable partner in the business. But I didn’t address the obvious question: What kind of name for a magazine was The Censor?

We associate the word “censor” with not allowing stuff to be published. So issuing a magazine with that name looks like calling a street “Roadblock Road,” or an airline “Grounded Air.”

But in the eighteenth century the word “censor” still had a more general meaning of an official in charge of upholding public morals. The Roman republic had censors, and if it was good enough for the Roman republic, then it was good enough for eighteenth-century British gentlemen.

When supporters of the royal government in Massachusetts sponsored The Censor, they chose the name because they saw themselves as responding to public immorality: riots, intimidation, law-breaking, and lack of respect for royal officials. Since many of the men funding and writing for the magazine were royal officials, they felt this keenly. Among the contributors were Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver (shown here, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery), his brother Judge Peter Oliver, and (anonymously, at least according to later rumors) Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr.

The magazine’s first issue was devoted to answering an attack on Gov. Thomas Hutchinson written by Joseph Greenleaf and printed in the Massachusetts Spy. Eventually the royal party chose a different strategy and tried to have Greenleaf, Spy printer Isaiah Thomas, and others indicted for libel, but the local grand jury refused to return an indictment against any of those Whigs.

One big challenge for the men writing The Censor was that the Whigs also presented themselves as fighting public immorality. They spoke of “liberty,” but they didn’t condone any excesses of personal liberty of the sort that censors guarded against. Samuel Adams was the last of the New England Puritans, and no one could outflank him in scolding the world about public immorality. The Whigs meant political and economic liberty. Their newspaper essays assured the people of Massachusetts that they already had fine morals, but had to guard their way of life from corrupt officials enforcing unconstitutional laws.

TOMORROW: Why The Censor was doomed from the start.

Abigail Paine: college boy's big sister

In 1746, Abigail Paine was a twenty-one-year-old Boston woman. Despite her intelligence, she had no chance to go to Harvard College, as her brother Robert Treat Paine did that year. He was only fifteen, but the mid-teens was the usual age for boys to enter college in this period.

Young Bob Paine seems to have kept in touch with his older sister and the rest of the family in a way parents might recognize today: by sending his laundry home. Here are extracts from some of the early letters from The Papers of Robert Treat Paine, vol. 1.

Abigail to Bob, 20 Oct: "Father is much Concern'd that you have no wood and wou'd have you Come down, we shall Send the horse this affernoon or in the morning if we have any Opertunity for their is a Nesessity of your Coming or Sending your Linnin for Wednesday is our Wash."

20 Nov: "Dear Brother, I am oblidg'd to you for Sending your Linnin to us but I am Sorry that you Could not afford us your Company when it desir'd it So Strongly but I'll Suspend my resentments till I see you and hear your reason. I have sent you one Shirt which will Last till thanksgiving, I pray that you wou'd bring all your Linin & Stockings for I did not Recive but three shirts & necks & 2 Caps."

The following March, Abigail told her little brother, "I have Sent you a peice of Cake and wish you Cou'd have more of it. If I Cou'd Come up, I wou'd bring one to keep your birth day." What a swell sister! She also reminded Bob, "I pray that you wou'd Send me all your dirty Linnen & Some more Berries."

In 1749, Abigail married a man working for her merchant father, Joseph Greenleaf. He became a lawyer and justice of the peace in Abington, then in the early 1770s moved to Boston and became involved in the Patriot cause. He wrote for (and helped fund) the Massachusetts Spy, then started the Royal American Magazine. Greenleaf remained politically active through and after the war, though he never achieved the prominence of his brother-in-law.

Abigail and Joseph Greenleaf had seven children, six surviving to adulthood. Abigail died in 1809, her husband a year later.

Samuel Adams: the blog response

I've complained about how many authors have painted a distorted picture of Samuel Adams, squeezing a Puritan gentleman politician of the late 1700s into the mold of a radical street organizer of the late 1800s. At least Buckeye Hamburger at the Daily Kos noticed.

On the other hand, the flame-broiled one repeats the "Adams was the most radical" picture, with approval instead of regret:

Among the Founding Fathers, none of whom was a slouch when it came to patriotic passion, Adams was undoubtedly the most radical, uncompromising and inflammatory.

I'd score that as one out of three. Adams was indeed loath to compromise on his principles and his conviction that the London ministry and its appointees were up to no good.

But Adams's political program wasn't as radical as that of Dr. Thomas Young, who was a deist and perhaps even a democrat. Active in Boston from 1768 to 1774, Young actually thought it would be a good idea to build spectator galleries in legislatures so that people could watch their laws being made and voice their own ideas. Imagine! Adams's program was basically conservative: returning to when Massachusetts men largely governed themselves with a lot of guidance from their Congregationalist traditions.

Nor was Adams the most inflammatory in his rhetoric of the Massachusetts Whigs. James Otis, Jr., allowed Adams—and only Adams—to hold him back in the legislature and edit his newspaper essays because he knew he could get carried way. (And eventually he was—straitjacketed in a coach, reportedly.)

Also more inflammatory than Adams was Dr. Joseph Warren, whose modern biographer John Cary has written:

In comparison with other contemporaries such as Samuel Adams,…Warren’s style is more personal, bombastic, and emotional. He uses the personal pronoun "I" more frequently and an inordinate number of imperative sentences charging the people to action. . . . A striking contrast to Warren’s style is that of Samuel Adams, whose writings are easily identifiable by his extraordinary number of long sentences and extensive use of the semicolon.

Long sentences and semicolons are hardly the hallmark of incendiary prose.

Dr. Warren was one of the Boston Whigs who came closest to being charged with a crime for his political writings. (Adams was never in that danger.) In the 29 Feb 1768 Boston Gazette he published a letter that ended:

We never can treat good and patriotic rulers with too great reverence. But it is certain that men totally abandoned to wickedness can never merit our regard, be their stations ever so high.

"If such men are by God appointed, The Devil may be the Lord's anointed."

A TRUE PATRIOT.

Gov. Francis Bernard and Chief Justice/Lt.-Gov. Thomas Hutchinson tried to get a grand jury to indict Warren for libel, but the locals refused.

After he became governor himself, Hutchinson tried the same tactic against Joseph Greenleaf, a country magistrate who had moved to Boston and become a partner of printer Isaiah Thomas. Again, the grand jury resisted, and Hutchinson dropped the case.

Those examples provide a parallel to today's events worthy of the Daily Kos. The White House and Republicans in Congress, smarting from criticism, have accused newspaper publishers of "treason." In pre-Revolutionary Boston royal appointees opposed political opinions, but today's authorities object to accurate accounts of our government's controversial activities overseas. Those officials claim that they're upset to see information about tracking international finances made public—which seems odd since they've boasted about such efforts for years. And, of course, have disclosed even more tightly classified information.

Could it be that there's an election coming up in the U.S. of A.? And whom do we have to thank for those elections? Men like Adams, Young, Otis, Warren, and Greenleaf.