“The General would be glad to confer with you”

Yesterday I started to profile Elisha Porter, as of July 1775 Hadley’s representative in the Massachusetts General Court and militia colonel.

Porter helped fellow lawyer Joseph Hawley of Northampton write this letter to the Continental Congress waxing eloquent on the need for more gunpowder:

Were you now in the Continental Army which invests Boston, it would beget unutterable vexation and torment in your hearts, to behold so large a body of so active brave men as that army consists of, insulted by the fire and blaze of the enemy’s cannon and mortars from their lines, ships, and floating batteries; and the same brave men, although possessed of divers good pieces of great ordnance, and willing, at any hazard, to improve them, yet wholly restrained from returning any fire of the kind, lest, by so doing, their little stock of gunpowder should soon be exhausted, and they reduced to the fatal necessity of laying down their arms or flying into the woods, leaving their houses to be burnt, their fields wasted; in short to give up and abandon the just claims of all America, and in effect to resign themselves and the lives of all the children of liberty in this whole Continent, to the arbitrary pleasure of a haughty Administration, instigated and influenced by enraged tories of our own breeding.

I couldn’t resist quoting that sentence, as transcribed by Peter Force.

In mid-July, Porter made a trip to New York, seeking “2 hhds Flints & 10 Tons Lead,” as the general wrote. He returned on 2 August, having succeeded in arranging for ”80,000 Flints & eight Tons of Lead.”

The next day, a council of war disclosed how little gunpowder the army had. Joseph Reed (shown above), Gen. George Washington’s military secretary, sent Porter a quick note:

If you could spare Time to ride down to Head Quarters this Afternoon the General would be glad to confer with you on a Matter of some Importance which you mentioned to him on your Return from New York

Porter made the short trip from Watertown to Cambridge. Later that day Washington wrote to Rhode Island governor Nicholas Cooke about the urgent need for gunpowder and the possibility of obtaining it from Bermuda, as quoted here. He concluded:

Col: Porter has undertaken to assist in the Matter or to provide some suitable Person to accompany [William] Harris to you who will communicate all Circumstances to you.

Porter personally carried that letter to Cooke. There was a brief glitch when they lost track of Harris, a sea captain who was continuing to shuttle among American ports. On 11 August, Cooke sent Porter back to Washington with a letter.

Gov. Cooke had already expressed his position: reports suggested that Bermudans were inclined to sell that powder to Continental forces, so there was no need to send a ship to the island, and besides Rhode Island didn’t have the resources for such a mission, anyway.

TOMORROW: The general’s response.

“I cannot shew any Countenance to it”

When the Massachusetts house informed Gov. Thomas Hutchinson on 25 Feb 1774 that it had voted to impeach Chief Justice Peter Oliver, his first response was that “he desired the Message may be reduced the Writing.”

The house named Samuel Adams, Joseph Hawley, and Robert Treat Paine a committee to do that reduction, then a larger committee to deliver the paragraph to the governor.

That afternoon, they asked where Hutchinson’s promised response was. Secretary Thomas Flucker replied that the governor had gone home to Milton.

The next morning the house received this message:

Gentlemen of the House of Representatives,

By your Message of Yesterday you informed me that you had Resolved to Impeach Peter Oliver, Esq; Chief Justice of the Superior Court, &. before the Governor and Council of High Crimes and Misdemeanors, and that you had prepared Articles of Impeachment, and you prayed that I would be in the Chair that you might then have the Opportunity of laying them before the Governor and Council.

I know of no Species of High Crimes and Misdemeanors nor any Offence against the Law committed within this Province, let the Rank or Condition of the Offender be what it may, which is not cognizable by some Judicatory or Judicatories, and I do not know what the Governor and Council have a concurrent Jurisdiction with any Judicatory in Criminal Cases, or any Authority to try and determine any Species of High Crimes and Misdemeanors whatsoever.

If I should assume a Jurisdiction and with the Council try Offenders against the Law without Authority granted by the Charter or by a Law of the Province in pursuance of the Charter, I should make myself liable to answer before a Judicatory which would have Cognizance of my Offence, and His Majesty’s Subjects would have just Cause to complain of being deprived of a Trial by Jury, the general Claim of Englishmen except in those Cases where the Law may have made special Provision to the contrary.

Whilst such Process as you have attempted to commence shall appear to me to be unconstitutional, I cannot shew any Countenance to it.

T. Hutchinson.
Milton, 26 Feb. 1774.

The assembly sent their articles of impeachment up to the Council anyway.

On 1 March the assembly produced a longer version and sent that up as well. The impeachment was entirely based on Oliver’s refusal to accept the legislature’s salary instead of the Crown’s; now the legislature also voted not to pay the chief justice any salary, so there. 

John Adams spent that evening talking politics. In his diary he wrote: “Much said of the Impeachment vs. the C.J.—and upon the Question whether the Council have the Power of Judicature in Parliament, which the Lords have at home, or whether the Governor and Council have this Power?” The next day he wrote out the arguments against and for the Council being able to act alone.

Adams also wrote:

Lt. Govr. [Andrew] Oliver, senseless, and dying, the Governor sent for and Olivers Sons. Flucker has laid in, to be Lieutenant Governor, and has perswaded Hutchinson to write in his favour. This will make a difficulty. C. J. Oliver, and Fluker will interfere.

On 3 March, Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver died.

TOMORROW: End of an impeachment.

“I saw your Street door vomit forth a Crowd of Senators”

During its 1773–74 session, the Massachusetts General Court spent a lot of time complaining about Chief Justice Peter Oliver accepting a salary from tea tax revenues.

But it wasn’t clear what the legislature could do about that.

Until the lawyer John Adams had a bright idea. Or at least that’s how he described the situation in his post-presidential memoir. And in this case he may well be accurate.

According to the older Adams, he was motivated by fear of popular violence:

I fully expected that if no Expedient could be suggested, that the Judges would be obliged to go where Secretary [Andrew] Oliver had gone to Liberty Tree [in 1765], and compelled to take an Oath to renounce the Royal Salaries. Some of these Judges were men of Resolution and the Chief Justice in particular, piqued himself so much upon it and had so often gloried in it on the Bench, that I shuddered at the expectation that the Mob might put on him a Coat of Tar and Feathers, if not put him to death.

Adams had served one term in the General Court in 1770–71, representing Boston, and then retired to Braintree for a while. In 1773 he was splitting his time between the towns and edging back into politics.

Adams recalled:

I happened to dine with Mr. Samuel Winthrop at New Bost[on], who was then Clerk of the Superiour Court, in company with several Members of the General Court of both Houses and with several other Gentlemen of the Town. Dr. John Winthrop Phylosophical Professor at [Harvard] Colledge and Dr. [Samuel] Cooper of Boston both of them very much my Friends, were of the Company.

The Conversation turned wholly on the Topic of the Day—the Case of the Judges. All agreed that it was a fatal Measure and would be the Ruin of the Liberties of the Country: But what was the Remedy? It seemed to be a measure that would execute itself. There was no imaginable Way of resisting or eluding it. There was lamentation and mourning enough: but no light and no hope. The Storm was terrible and no blue Sky to be discovered.

I had been entirely silent, and in the midst of all this gloom, Dr. Winthrop, addressing himself to me, said Mr. Adams We have not heard your Sentiments on this Subject, how do you consider it? . . . What can be done?

I answered, that I knew not whether any one would approve of my Opinion but I believed there was one constitutional Resource, but I knew not whether it would be possible to persuade the proper Authority to have recourse to it.

Several Voices at once cryed out, a constitutional Resource! what can it be?

I said it was nothing more nor less than an Impeachment of the Judges by the House of Representatives before the Council.

An Impeachment! Why such a thing is without Precedent.

I believed it was, in this Province: but there had been precedents enough, and by much too many in England: It was a dangerous Experiment at all times: but it was essential to the preservation of the Constitution in some Cases, that could be reached by no other Power, but that of Impeachment.

No one mentioned the Massachusetts legislature’s attempt in 1706 to impeach some associates of Gov. Joseph Dudley, squelched by the privy council in London. But of course any good lawyer could argue the differences between the cases meant that precedent didn’t apply.

Adams continued in a common vein for him, saying that even his learned colleagues told him he was wrong, but he showed them he was right:

The next day, I believe, Major [Joseph] Hawley came to my House and told me, he heard I had broached a strange Doctrine. He hardly knew what an Impeachment was, he had never read any one and never had thought on the Subject. I told him he might read as many of them as he pleased. There stood the State Tryals on the Shelf which were full of them, of all sorts good and bad. I shewed him Seldens Works in which is a Treatise on Judicature in Parliament, and gave it him to read. . . . We looked into the Charter together, and after a long conversation and a considerable Research he said he knew not how to get rid of it.

In a Day or two another Lawyer in the House came to me, full of doubts and difficulties, He said he heard I had shown Major Hawley some Books relative to the Subject and desired to see them. I shewed them to him and made nearly the same comment upon them. It soon became the common Topick and research of the Bar. . . .

The Members of the House, becoming soon convinced that there was something for them to do, appointed a Committee to draw up Articles of Impeachment against the Chief Justice Oliver. Major Hawley who was one of this Committee, would do nothing without me, and insisted on bringing them to my house, to examine and discuss the Articles paragraph by Paragraph, which was readily consented to by the Committee. Several Evenings were spent in my Office, upon this Business, till very late at night. One Morning, meeting Ben. Gridley, he said to me Brother Adams you keep late Hours at your House: as I passed it last night long after midnight, I saw your Street door vomit forth a Crowd of Senators.

Benjamin Gridley was a fellow lawyer, but one who leaned toward the Crown and later became a Loyalist.

TOMORROW: Putting the plan into action.

Two Salaries for Chief Justice Peter Oliver

One of the Massachusetts Whigs’ complaint about Thomas Hutchinson in the 1760s is that he amassed too many offices for himself.

Hutchinson was simultaneously the lieutenant governor, as such a member of the Council, the chief justice of the superior court, and a probate judge.

When Gov. Francis Bernard went home to Britain and Hutchinson became the acting governor, he gave up his judicial posts. Benjamin Lynde seemed like a natural fit for that role—his father, also named Benjamin Lynde, had been chief justice from 1729 to 1745.

After less than two years, however, Lynde resigned. Hutchinson, now governor in his own right, looked for a new chief justice. But first, he appointed his brother Foster to the court.

(Lyndes and Hutchinsons weren’t the only judicial dynasties. In 1772, William Cushing became a third-generation justice.)

Gov. Hutchinson decided to recommend elevating associate justice Peter Oliver (shown above) to the chief position. Oliver had been on the court since 1756. He was a strong supporter of unpopular Crown officials, as he’d shown at the trials of Ebenezer Richardson, Capt. Thomas Preston, and the British soldiers in 1770.

Oliver was also related to Hutchinson by marriage in three different ways. And his own brother Andrew was lieutenant governor. For the Whigs, Hutchinson giving his old jobs to his in-laws didn’t really look like sharing power.

One aspect of royal rule that should seem foreign to us is that Crown officials could keep a lot more of their actions secret from the public. Since the people’s representatives weren’t involved in choosing governors and justices or paying their salaries under the Townshend Acts, why did they need to know?

In July 1772 the Massachusetts General Court demanded that Gov. Hutchinson tell them whether he was getting paid by the Crown. He said he was. Joseph Hawley, a lawyer and representative from Northampton, drafted resolutions condemning this arrangement, but the legislature couldn’t do anything more about it.

It took even more time for the assembly to confirm that the royal government had offered salaries to Chief Justice Oliver and his colleagues. And even then it wasn’t clear the justices would accept that money. That didn’t stop Samuel Adams and the new Boston committee of correspondence from making that their primary complaint to other towns in late 1772.

In early 1773 the General Court tested the system by appropriating £300 to pay Oliver for the previous judicial term and £200 for the associate justices. In June, the newly elected legislature (many of the representatives having been reelected) asked treasurer Harrison Gray if the justices had collected that money. They had taken only half, Gray reported.

Aha! said the legislators. That means the justices were living off the royal government’s tax revenue. At the end of June, the General Court demanded that those men renounce any pay except what it had voted on. This is one of the paradoxical moments in Revolutionary confrontations: Massachusetts politicians demanding to pay government officials they disliked instead of letting the royal government do it. But it was the principle of the thing, you see.

The associate justices agreed that they wouldn’t accept any more royal pay. Chief Justice Oliver didn’t. The next move was up to the Whigs. But according to the provincial charter, they had no role in picking judges. So what could they do?

TOMORROW: John Adams’s bright idea.

Bipolar Disorder as a Factor in the American Revolution?

Instead of porphyria as the explanation for George III’s madness, in the paper I quoted yesterday Timothy Peters pointed to bipolar disorder: a cycle of mania and depression that debilitated the monarch for long, unpredictable stretches in his later life.

Andrew Roberts adopts this conclusion in his new biography of the king. Other scholars might have proposed the same answer as well.

Some might respond that that’s not so much of a diagnosis as a description of the king’s symptoms. Why did his mood shift so drastically? Indeed, part of the appeal of the preceding porphyria diagnosis is that it seems to offer an “explanation” to point to.

Many psychiatrists would counter that even if we don’t know the causal mechanisms of bipolar disorder, it’s a widely recognized condition. About the same fraction of people have it in many different cultures, strongly suggesting that a similar fraction of people had it in the eighteenth century.

Indeed, a number of other prominent figures in the American Revolution showed signs of the disorder. I’m not talking about people whose politics or opinions other people sometimes called “mad,” such as John Adams, but men who went through periods of not being able to function because of depression and other periods of exuberance that got them into trouble.

In Massachusetts, the most prominent example was the early radical leader James Otis, Jr. He suffered several periods of insanity in the 1770s and early 1780s, bad enough that his family bundled him off to houses in the country.

William Tudor, Jr.’s 1823 biography blamed Otis’s coffee-house brawl with John Robinson for those troubles. But John Adams’s diary and other contemporaneous sources from 1769 suggest that Otis’s troubles were already evident by then, and that he actually went into that confrontation during a manic period.

In addition, the Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings for May 1858 refers to a letter from Otis’s younger brother, Samuel Allyne Otis, to their father with “evidence of the existence of a tendency to insanity in the younger [James] Otis, which manifested itself at an early period of his life.” Of course, being beaten on the skull didn’t help the man’s mental stability.

Contemporaries also recognized that the Northampton lawyer Joseph Hawley (1723-1788) fell into a debilitating depression around the start of the Revolutionary War. Until then, he had been a strong Whig voice from the western part of the province, sometimes voicing radical arguments in the courts and legislature. Indeed, in the late 1760s his criticism of the Superior Court was so strong it got him disbarred for a time.

In May 1775 Hawley wrote to his colleague Theodore Sedgwick that he felt “very low and melancholy,” complaining of “want of health or memory, weakness of body and Shocking impair of mind.” He declined requests to serve in the Continental Congress and retired entirely in late 1776. In the following years friends would find Hawley confined to his house, biographer E. Francis Brown wrote, sitting in front of his fire and smoking for hours with a “wild and piercing look” in his eyes.

I think another Massachusetts lawyer in the opposite political camp, attorney general Jonathan Sewall, also shows a pattern of manic-depressive behavior. He certainly suffered a severe depression after going into exile during the war. But Sewall’s refusal to participate in the Boston Massacre trials and his uneven output of newspaper essays might be best explained as signs of severely changing moods.

The cases of both Hawley and Sewall offer evidence of how there’s a hereditary aspect to bipolar disorder. Hawley’s father committed suicide, and Sewall’s son was also known to have depressive episodes.

In Renegade Revolutionary: The Life of Charles Lee (2014), Phillip Pappas posits that bipolar disorder is the best explanation of that general’s wild and often self-defeating behavior—the risk-taking that led to his capture in 1776, his choice as a prisoner to offer strategic advice to Gen. William Howe, what looks like an attempt to draw Gen. George Washington into a duel after the battle of Monmouth, and so on.

Assuming these men did have bipolar disorder, did that affect the course of the Revolution? I think it’s conceivable that Otis was a bit manic when he broke with the Crown in the early 1760s and formulated his foundational arguments about the illegitimacy of Parliament’s revenue laws. I’m not saying that political position was crazy, but it was radical enough that Otis might never have had the audacity to stake out that ground otherwise.

Whatever Happened to Jesse Saville?

On 7 Apr 1770, acting governor Thomas Hutchinson sent the Massachusetts General Court documents from Essex County justices of the peace describing the previous month’s mobbing of Jesse Saville.

Hutchinson said Saville “had been most inhumanly treated for seeking redress in the course of the law for former injuries received.” He complained that Gloucester was becoming a violent town.

In his history of Massachusetts, Hutchinson complained, “The house suffered the message to lie more than a fortnight; but, two or three days before the assembly must, by the charter, be dissolved, they sent a very long answer.”

This was delivered by a committee that included strong Whigs John Hancock, Joseph Hawley, and James Warren. In part, they complained:

…we cannot think it consistent with the justice of this house, to come into measures which may imply a censure upon individuals, much less upon a community hitherto unimpeached in point of good order: or even to form any judgment upon the matter, until more light shall appear than the papers accompanying your message afford. The house cannot easily conceive what should determine your honour so particularly to recommend this instance to the consideration of the assembly, while others of a much more heinous nature and dangerous tendency have passed altogether unnoticed in your message…

The committee then took the opportunity to renew all the complaints about the king’s soldiers sent to Boston in 1768. It was, after all, the year of the Boston Massacre. The exchange was reprinted in British periodicals, making the third mobbing of Jesse Saville an element in the larger imperial conflict.

But Gov. Hutchinson never mentioned Saville’s name. He was, after all, just a tanner. The General Court committee likewise didn’t name this Customs employee. And that conflict was soon lost in the wash of other disputes, surviving only in the Essex County courts.

When I started the research for this series of postings about Jesse Saville, I found a secondary-source reference to yet another mob attack on him in 1771. But studying that reference further showed me it used language from the 1769 attack, so I think that was just an error.

Therefore, I have no sources on Saville’s experiences as Massachusetts’s conflict with the Crown heated up in the early 1770s, and as the war started. In fact, I’m not even sure he continued to work for the Customs service. He certainly didn’t move into Boston and evacuate with other revenue officers.

And that’s the biggest surprise of this story: Jesse Saville, mobbed three times in three years for helping His Majesty’s Customs Office, didn’t become a Loyalist. In fact, his son John, born in 1768, is reported as having gone to sea at 1782, being taken by a British frigate, and never returning.

Jesse Saville stayed in Gloucester. When his first wife, Martha, died in 1785, he remarried the next year to a woman named Hannah Dane and had a couple more children. When he died in 1823, Saville’s property included half of a house, half of a barn, a couple of pastures, and “1/4 part of a Pew in Squam Meeting House.”

Furthermore, he merited a fairly long obituary in the 26 March Columbian Centinel:

Mr. Saville was possessed of an uncommonly strong mind, and a very retentive memory. There was not a man perhaps in Gloucester who possessed such a perfect recollection of ancient transactions, grants, and land marks, as did Mr. Saville; for he seemed to have contained in his head, a successive record of all events; and more especially those of a local nature, for more than 70 years.—

In his political character, he was an undeviating FEDERALIST, adhering strictly to the sentiments of the immortal WASHINGTON, whom he always considered the polar star in the American political hemisphere.

In his religious theory, he was a Universalist, having the most unwavering belief in the great doctrine of reconciliation by JESUS CHRIST, as taught by the late Rev. JOHN MURRAY.

Murray’s meetinghouse, built in 1806, appears above.

Not everyone was as admiring as New England’s Federalist newspaper. In his 1860 local history, John J. Babson noted Saville’s work as a Customs officer and stated:

The strict performance of what he considered his duty made him odious to his townsmen, and for it he suffered severely in his person and property. It also subjected him to annoyance in later days, as the hostile feelings engendered by his official acts long survived the events which called them forth.

Nonetheless, Babson deemed Jesse Saville as having “lived a useful but retired life.” 

John Adams and “the important Secret”

John Adams’s diary offers a case study of how well the Massachusetts Whigs kept the secrets that Benjamin Franklin asked Thomas Cushing to keep.

Adams received the “Collection of Seventeen Letters” on 22 March 1773. Since he was no longer a member of the Massachusetts legislature, he definitely wasn’t on Franklin’s list of people Cushing could share the letters with. But evidently he was supposed to take the letters to someone else while attending a county court.

At some point Adams copied the cover letter, omitting Franklin’s name (if he’d even received the original revealing it). He also copied out the most damning letter by Thomas Hutchinson. As far as I can tell, there’s no clear evidence of when Adams made that copy—it might have been after the letters were published. But Franklin had asked for no one to make copies.

We can presume Adams told his wife Abigail about the letters. She doesn’t seem to have been as active in political discussions then as she would be later, when she didn’t have four children under the age of eight to look after. But John was probably already sharing what was on his mind, and those letters certainly were.

On 24 April, John wrote in his diary:

I have communicated to Mr. Norton Quincy, and to Mr. Wibird the important Secret. They are as much affected, by it, as any others.

Norton Quincy (1716-1801) was Abigail’s favorite uncle. He lived in some seclusion in Braintree after the death of his wife, so he probably wouldn’t pass on the secret.

“Mr. Wibird” was the Rev. Anthony Wibird (1729-1800), the Adamses’ minister, not yet in his dotage. Given New England’s deference to clergymen, discussing the letters with him was at least understandable.

Adams went on, indicating he had already discussed the letters with two members of the General Court:

Bone of our Bone, born and educated among us! Mr. [John] Hancock is deeply affected, is determined in Conjunction with Majr. [Joseph] Hawley to watch the vile Serpent, and his deputy Serpent [William] Brattle.

The Subtilty, of this Serpent, is equal to that of the old one.

The “vile Serpent” was Gov. Hutchinson. William Brattle was a member of the Council who had been a big supporter of the anti-Stamp Act demonstrations in 1765 but then moved over to the royal authorities’ side after becoming a militia general. He and Adams had a public argument over judicial salaries.

But those weren’t all the people who knew.

Aunt is let into the Secret, and is full of her Interjections!

I’m not sure which lady Adams meant by this. I think he had only one living aunt at the time, Bethiah Bicknell of Braintree, and they weren’t particularly close. He referred to many other older female relatives as “Aunt,” however, so who knows what lady was interjecting about “the important secret”?

Adams had also heard how other people knew and might spread the word:

Cushing tells me, that [Council member Jeremiah Dummer] Powell told him, he had it from a Tory, or one who was not suspected to be any Thing else, that certain Letters were come, written by 4 Persons, which would shew the Causes and the Authors of our present Grievances. This Tory, we conjecture to be Bob. Temple [of Medford], who has received a Letter, in which he is informed of these Things. If the Secret [should leak] out by this means, I am glad it is not to be charged upon any of Us—to whom it has been committed in Confidence.

Because of course it would look bad if the Whigs couldn’t keep a secret.

The next afternoon, Adams attended the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper’s meeting in Boston:

Dr. Cooper was upon Rev. 12.9. And the great Dragon was cast out, that old Serpent called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole World: he was cast out into the Earth and his Angells were cast out with him. Query. Whether the Dr. had not some political Allusions in the Choice of this Text.

Adams felt Cooper was poor at keeping secrets, judging by his remark the following month after hearing Hancock speak of political plans. “Cooper no doubt carried it directly to Brattle, or at least to his Son Thomas,” Adams wrote. “Such a leaky Vessell is this worthy Gentleman.”

As I quoted yesterday, in June 1773 Cushing assured Franklin that only two other people knew he had supplied the letters—but one of those two was Cooper.

So really it’s remarkable that the letters came as a surprise to anybody in Boston.

“A person in the street had put into his hands a number of papers”?

In his 9 June 1773 response to the Massachusetts house about his letters, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson insisted he hadn’t written anything secret or oppressive. He then went on:

I am at a Loss for what Purpose you desire the Copies of my Letters the Originals of which you have in your Hands. If it is with a View to make them Publick, the Originals are more proper for that Purpose than the Copies. 

Hutchinson was a historian, after all—always use original sources if they’re available.

He continued:

I think it would be very improper and out of Character in me to lay my private Letters before you at your Request: My publick ones I am restrained from laying before you without express Leave from his Majesty. Thus much however I may assure you, that it has not been the Tendency and Design of them to subvert the Constitution of this Government, but rather to preserve it entire, and I have Reason to think they have not been altogether ineffectual to that Purpose.

It’s not clear whether Hutchinson knew then that the man who had sent those letters, Benjamin Franklin, had insisted that they not be made public. But the Whig legislators put in motion a way of doing so.

Immediately after the governor’s reply was read in the house, John Hancock spoke up to say:

…he had received Copies of certain Letters signed Thos. Hutchinson, Andw. Oliver, Charles Paxton, and Robert Auchmuty, which he supposed were Copies of the Letters before the House, and moved that they might be compared.

According to Hutchinson’s later history, which isn’t entirely reliable:

…a pitiful expedient was found out. Mr. Hancock acquainted the house, that a person in the street had put into his hands a number of papers, which appeared to him to be copies of the letters which were lying before the house, and he moved that they might be compared; and an order passed for that purpose. It seems to have been intended as an excuse for the publishing of what had been delivered upon an express condition not to publish.

On 10 June, the house formed a committee headed by Joseph Hawley “to consider of some Means honorably to make this House fully possessed of the Letters communicated by Mr. [Samuel] Adams under certain restrictions.”

In recounting this move, Hutchinson applied particular acerbity to the word “honorably.” He reported:

In a very few hours, Mr. Hawley reported from this committee, that Mr. Adams had acquainted them, that, as copies of the letters were already abroad, and had been publickly read, the gentleman from whom the letters were received [i.e., speaker of the house Thomas Cushing] gave his consent, that the house should be fully possessed of them, to print, copy, or make what other use of them they pleased, relying on the goodness of the house that the original letters be returned, in their own time, they retaining attested copies of the same for their use.

That was a very close paraphrase of the legislative record. That day, the house contracted with the Edes and Gill print shop in Boston to print 316 copies of the letters that related to Massachusetts (omitting those focused on Rhode Island and Connecticut) and 300 copies of the house resolves condemning those letters. That order came to almost £20.

Hutchinson wrote:

The house then ordered the letters to be printed, but, before they were suffered to be made publick, the resolves of the house upon them were printed and dispersed in newspapers through the province, and a recital of any parts or expressions in the letters was carefully avoided, and only the general design and tendency of them declared.

The governor knew he'd lost control of the narrative.

TOMORROW: Public opinion.

Talking About Revolutionary Massachusetts This Week

From midnight to 1:00 A.M. on Wednesday, 26 July, I’m scheduled to be interviewed by Bradley Jay on his radio show, Jay Talking. That will be on WBZ, 1030 AM.

[CORRECTION: It turns out that when I agreed to be on the show on 26 July, the producer was thinking that’s the date when I’d show up at the studio for a show to be broadcast on 27 July. So the conversation will actually happen early on Thursday.]

(Assuming, that is, that the U.S. Constitution is still operative and we haven’t stumbled into any wars that will preempt regular programming. Hard to be confident these days.)

I understand that Jay is a fan of Revolutionary history. I expect we’ll talk about The Road to Concord, Gen. Washington in Cambridge, and other gossip I’ve collected over the years. But this will be a new experience.

On Saturday, 29 July, I’ll be one of the many speakers at History Camp Pioneer Valley, to be held at the Kittredge Center at Holyoke Community College. This is the second annual gathering of history enthusiasts sharing their research to be organized by the Pioneer Valley History Network.

My presentation will be “An Assassin in Pre-Revolutionary Boston: The Strange Case of Samuel Dyer.” Other presentations on Revolutionary history include “Resurrecting the Memory of Major Joseph Hawley of Northampton: John Adams’s Campaign for a Forgotten Patriot” by Morgan E. Kolakowski, “A Forgotten ‘Hessian’ Prisoner in Brimfield during the Revolutionary War” by Larry and Kitty Lowenthal, “Early Black American Patriotism” by Adam McNeil, and “Pioneer Valley Gravestones (and some of the men who made them), c. 1650-1850” by Bob Drinkwater.

As of today there are still a few slots available for History Camp Pioneer Valley.

Josiah Quincy for the Defense

Yesterday we left tobacconist John Willson on trial for the murder of a shoemaker named David Murray in 1771. That was on 6 September, slightly less than a month after Murray had turned up dead on the shore of Boston Neck.

The facts weren’t in Willson’s favor. People had seen the two men leave Castle William in a boat together, and Willson didn’t tell a coherent story of what happened. Though there were no witnesses, it seemed pretty clear that the two men had gotten into a fistfight.

The law was also not on Willson’s side. If the jury decided he killed Murray in a fight, British rules of the time didn’t offer much leeway in evaluating whether he deserved to die. He would have had to prove the circumstances of manslaughter or self-defense. There were no prisons as an alternative to the gallows.

Courtroom records from the 1770s are quite sparse, with the exception of the trials that followed the Boston Massacre. But we have Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s speech defending Willson. That appears in Joseph Hawley’s commonplace book, recently digitized by the New York Public Library.

After quoting from a couple of legal authorities, Quincy challenged the jury to live up to those standards since “our crown law is with justice supposed to be more nearly advanced to perfection.”

Finally he addressed the specifics of this case:

One doubt in this case is whether the dec[ease]d. was killed by any man.—another doubt there certainly will be, whether he was killed by the prisoner. But if he was so killed, will any one say that the prisoner was guilty of murder? a Crime at which human nature starts, and which is almost universally punished with death. . . .

It will be said, perhaps, if you are fully convinced, that the prisoner killed the decd[,] every circumstance to justify or excuse such killing must be proved by the prisoner. This no doubt is good law. But here it is impossible; none being present but the prisoner and the decd.

Can it be supposed to be law, reason, or christianity to oblige a prisoner to prove impossibilities, or lose his life? how astonishing to suppose reason so little to prevail at the formation of our laws, and under the formalities of justice, that weak equivocal evidence, nay surmise and suspicion, should ever be thought sufficient proof—for crimes, the most atrocious in their nature, the most deliberate in their commission, and therefore the most improbable, as if it were the interest of the laws and the judges, and for the good of society, not to enquire with charity and candor, but to prove the crimes: as if there was not greater risk of condemning any person when the probability of his guilt is less. . . .

If a man be found suddenly dead in a room, and another be found running out in hast with a bloody sword; the blood, the weapon, the hasty flight, are all the necessary concomitants of such horrid facts.—here are deficient the weapon—the blood on such weapon, and above all the hasty flight. Did the prisoner fly, did he ever attempt to secrete himself?

or In some cases presumptive evidences go far to prove a person guilty, tho there be no express proof of the fact to be committed by him, but then it must be warily pressed (and surely as cautiously believed) so as to convict em. For it is better that 10 guilty persons escape unpunished than one Innocent person should die. &c

The 12 Sept 1771 Boston News-Letter reported the outcome of Quincy’s argument:

At the Superior Court held here, on Friday last, John Willson was tried for the Murder of David Murray, who was found dead on the Neck, mentioned in this Paper of the 15th of August last: The Jury brought in their Verdict, Not Guilty.

Not simply not guilty of murder, but not guilty of all charges.

The fact that Hawley copied Quincy’s argument into his commonplace book suggests that the attorneys of Massachusetts thought it was a remarkable case.

Hawley, Adams, Gridley, and Otis, Attorneys at Law

Going back to the newly digitized Joseph Hawley Papers at the New York Public Library, one noteworthy item is Hawley’s commonplace book.

A commonplace book was a notebook in which a (usually) gentleman copied out passages from books or documents that he found interesting, thoughts he wanted to explore, and other material. For example, Hawley’s starts with “Thoughts on various Subjects” and extracts from Cicero “of the Principles of the Stoics.”

Then comes something very meaty for historians of the Revolution: a summary of Jeremiah Gridley’s argument for the Crown in the February 1761 writs of assistance case, followed by the much longer rebuttal from James Otis, Jr. (shown here).

Late in life, and resentful of all the attention Patrick Henry and Virginia were getting, John Adams argued that that court case was the real beginning of the American Revolution. “Then and there the Child Independence was born,” he told William Tudor in 1817. Not coincidentally, almost all the information we have about that event was supplied by John Adams, sometimes with an extra helping of courtroom drama.

Hawley’s commonplace book contains, I understand from Mark Boonshoft’s essay at the Junto blog, the most complete rendering of those arguments to survive. Adams probably wrote out those texts from his notes between the argument in February and 3 Apr 1761, when he showed a copy to Col. Josiah Quincy. Compared to his later description, they are less dramatic but more reliable, though still a long way from a true transcript.

Interestingly, Adams’s own manuscript of these arguments doesn’t exist. Instead, he gets credit for having written the textual ancestor of several overlapping versions that do survive, including Hawley’s. On 29 Apr 1773 the Massachusetts Spy printed Otis’s speech, sparking more interest in it. That August, the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence sent the Gridley and Otis arguments to the Connecticut legislature. Joseph Hawley was on that committee, so that’s probably how he got to make a copy of his own.

Poking through the Joseph Hawley Papers

Harvard University isn’t the only institution digitizing Revolutionary-era documents, of course.

The New York Public Library ended up with a bunch of significant papers from Massachusetts, including Samuel Adams’s papers and the correspondence of the Boston Committee of Correspondence. It too has been scanning lots of documents and making them available to the world for free as part of its Early American Manuscripts Project.

I’ll start with the Joseph Hawley Papers. Hawley was an attorney in Northampton, respected by all Massachusetts Whigs for his legal knowledge and judgment. He was quite active in the Massachusetts legislature leading up to the Revolutionary War.

This is Hawley’s copy of the text of a letter that William Brattle sent to Gen. Thomas Gage in late August 1774 warning about rumblings of military preparation in the countryside. Gage responded by removing gunpowder from the provincial powderhouse in what is now Somerville. The rural militia mobilized in what became known as the “Powder Alarm.” That event signaled how Massachusetts farmers had become more confrontational than Bostonians.

Here’s a letter from a man in Boston on 27 Feb 1775 worrying that the Massachusetts Provincial Congress has given too much power to its Committee of Safety to call out the militia again:

when once the Soldiers are mustered by order of the Committee they will suppose it their duty to fight, and for fear of being Impeached for Cowardice, it is more than probable they will Commence Hostilities…

Who wrote that letter? The page with the signature doesn’t appear to have survived. But the handwriting looks a lot like that in this July 1775 letter from Thomas Cushing—Boston merchant, speaker of the Massachusetts house, and delegate to the Continental Congress.

Later in July Cushing wrote again with news that the Congress had chosen Hawley to help negotiate with Native American nations in the northern theater. Hawley’s papers also include a commission signed by John Hancock. There follow a few letters from the other commissioners, asking why they hadn’t heard from Hawley. Finally he wrote to the Congress saying he couldn’t take on the job because of this health—quite possibly the beginning of a long depression that curtailed his political activity.

Hawley appears to have remained active in local affairs, at least at times. His papers include an August 1775 document in which a bunch of British prisoners signed onto the terms of their parole within the town of Northampton. Here are notes on how Hawley’s town voted to pay “nine-month men” enlisting in the Continental Army, and here’s the list of some men who signed up on those terms.

“Capt. John Callender is accordingly cashiered”

After the British won the Battle of Bunker Hill, there was a great deal of finger-pointing on the American side. Eventually New Englanders decided the battle had actually been a Good Thing, but they still blamed several officers for behaving poorly.

As I related back here, Gen. Israel Putnam insisted that an artillery captain he had met on the battlefield be court-martialed for abandoning his cannon. That process had a false start, but by the time Gen. George Washington settled into his new job in Cambridge the verdict was awaiting his approval.

On 7 July 1775, the commander-in-chief’s general orders made a big deal of his decsion:

It is with inexpressible Concern that the General upon his first Arrival in the army, should find an Officer sentenced by a General Court Martial to be cashier’d for Cowardice—A Crime of all others, the most infamous in a Soldier, the most injurious to an Army, and the last to be forgiven; inasmuch as it may, and often does happen, that the Cowardice of a single Officer may prove the Distruction of the whole Army:

The General therefore (tho’ with great Concern, and more especially, as the Transaction happened before he had the Command of the Troops) thinks himself obliged for the good of the service, to approve the Judgment of the Court Martial with respect to Capt. John Callender, who is hereby sentenced to be cashiered. Capt. John Callender is accordingly cashiered and dismissd from all farther service in the Continental Army as an Officer.

The General having made all due inquiries, and maturely consider’d this matter is led to the above determination not only from the particular Guilt of Capt. Callenders, but the fatal Consequences of such Conduct to the army and to the cause of america.

He now therefore most earnestly exhorts Officers of all Ranks to shew an Example of Bravery and Courage to their men; assuring them that such as do their duty in the day of Battle, as brave and good Officers, shall be honor’d with every mark of distinction and regard; their names and merits made known to the General Congress and all America: while on the other hand, he positively declares that every Officer, be his rank what it may, who shall betray his Country, dishonour the Army and his General, by basely keeping back and shrinking from his duty in any engagement; shall be held up as an infamous Coward and punish’d as such, with the utmost martial severity; and no Connections, Interest or Intercessions in his behalf will avail to prevent the strict execution of justice.

Was Washington trying to make an example of Capt. John Callender? He certainly was. His language, especially at the end, closely followed the suggestion of the respected Massachusetts legislator Joseph Hawley, who on 5 July had written to him:

…I suggest, that although in the Massachusetts part of the Army there are divers brave and intrepid officers, yet there are too many, and even several Colonels, whose characters, to say the least, are very equivocal with respect to courage. There is much more cause to fear that the officers will fail in a day of trial, than the privates. I may venture to say, that if the officers will do their duty, there is no fear of the soldiery.

I therefore most humbly propose to your consideration the propriety and advantage of your making immediately a most solemn and peremptory declaration to all the officers of the Army, in general orders, or otherwise, as your wisdom shall direct, assuring them that every officer who, in the day of battle, shall fully do his duty, shall not fail of your kindest notices and highest marks of your favour; but, on the other hand, that every officer who, on such a day, shall act the poltron, dishonour his General, and by failing of his duty, betray his Country, shall infallibly meet his deserts, whatever his rank, connexions, or interest may be; and that no intercessions on his behalf will be likely to be of any avail for his pardon.

Of course, it’s one thing to say the system was going to be strict with everyone—it’s another thing to carry that out. Callender wasn’t the only Massachusetts artillery officer who had performed below expectations at Bunker Hill. But the other two were the son and nephew of the artillery regiment’s commander. It took months before they faced courts-martial. “No Connections, Interest or Intercessions” indeed!

Calendar eventually returned to the army. Of the Gridley cousins, Scarborough was convicted and cashiered, Samuel acquitted, but neither was in the Continental Army at the start of 1776.

“The Murder Act as it is commonly called”

Yesterday I quoted the meat of Parliament’s Administration of Justice in Massachusetts Act, passed in the spring of 1774. The law provided for royal officials indicted for murder in the course of enforcing the law to be tried outside the province. How did local Patriots respond?

They started calling that law “the Murder Act.” Because, they said, it encouraged those officials to murder protesters with impunity. Which was quite an overstatement, but the two sides had been tussling over the quality of or interference in Massachusetts justice for several years.

I went looking for the earliest use of that phrase, and was surprised to find it first as the 26 July 1774 Essex Gazette quoted and paraphrased an essay from the 27 June South-Carolina Gazette (which I couldn’t locate). That article advocated a boycott of all goods from other parts of the British Empire until Parliament repealed its new Coercive Acts, including “the MURDER-ACT.”

On 26 Sept 1774, John Adams adopted the same language when he wrote from Philadelphia to his Braintree neighbor Joseph Palmer:

Before this reaches you, the Sense of the [Continental] Congress concerning your Wisdom, Fortitude and Temperance, in the Massachusetts in general and the County of Suffolk in particular, will be public, in our Country. It is the universal Sense here that the Mass. Acts, and Murder Act ought not to be Submitted to a Moment.

Adams’s cousin Samuel picked up the phrase in a 29 Jan 1775 letter to Arthur Lee, a Virginian in London who lobbied Parliament for the Massachusetts House:

The Act for regulating the Government of this Province and the Murder Act as it is commonly called soon followd the Port Act; and General [Thomas] Gage, whether from his own Motives or the Instructions of the Minister, thought proper to assemble all the Kings Troops then on the Continent, in this Town and has declared to the Selectmen & others his Resolution to put the Acts in Execution.

Then Joseph Hawley, Northampton’s leading lawyer, used the phrase in a 22 February letter to Thomas Cushing:

Since I left Cambridge, I have had many thoughts on the state of this Province and continent; and suffer me to say, Sir, that the time is in fact arrived, when we are to drop all chimerical plans, and in our contemplations thoroughly to think down, and pervade every step that is proposed for practice; to judge of its practicability, and, as far as possible, to view all its consequences. With this conviction, I have been most seriously contemplating the commission and most important trust of our Committee of Safety, and especially that branch of it which relates to their mustering the minute men and others of the militia, when they shall judge that the late Acts of Parliament, viz. the regulation act and the murder act, are attempted to be carried into execution by force.

However, I haven’t found other examples of the phrase “Murder Act” in American newspapers or founders’ correspondence from 1774-75. I don’t claim to have caught every example, but I think the lack of widespread use of the phrase is telling. However much Whig activists tried to play up this new law, the “Murder Act” seems to have been a relatively mild concern.

(I also started this investigation with the thought that Adams and Hawley both knew the phrase “Murder Act” already from studying Britain’s Murder Act of 1751 or 1752. However, that short title didn’t become official until 1896 and appears in earlier sources rarely if at all. That law’s official title was “An Act for better preventing the horrid Crime of Murder.”)

TOMORROW: George Washington and the “Murder Act.”

The Slow Spread of Official News about Bunker Hill

In response to this week’s question about George Washington on 17 June 1775, the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill, a few people guessed he was in New York on the way to the siege lines. In fact, he didn’t leave Philadelphia until the morning of 23 June, a full week after he agreed to be commander-in-chief. His letters make clear that even he didn’t expect his departure to take that long.

Washington reached New York on 25 June, and there opened a dispatch from Boston with a report on the fighting in Massachusetts. (Adding to the chronological confusion, the letters Washington sent during his journey north all appear to be misdated by one day.) The dispatch that Washington read that day brings up another mystery.

News of the first shots at Lexington on the morning of 19 Apr 1775 reached New York on the afternoon of 23 April, according to the comprehensive table at the back of David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride. So a little less than five days.

Yet the report on Bunker Hill arrived in New York eight days after the battle, even assuming that no dispatch rider departed until light on 18 June. Why the difference?

On 18 June, the day after the fight, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress appointed a six-man committee to “prepare a letter to the Continental Congress on the late attack of the king’s troops at Bunker’s hill, &c.” That committee included Joseph Hawley, James Warren, Dr. Benjamin Church, and James Otis, Sr.—all heavy hitters. But the congress was then officially leaderless with Dr. Joseph Warren missing and feared dead. On the afternoon of 19 June, the legislature chose James Warren (shown above, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts) as its new president.

On 20 June, the Provincial Congress reviewed its committee’s report on the battle, “paragraph by paragraph,” and ordered it to be copied and sent. Their dispatch referred to an “anonymous letter from Boston” numbering the British casualties at “about one thousand,” which turned out to be more accurate than the committee thought.

That was probably the letter that Washington opened in New York five days later. So the mail riders weren’t slow. The Provincial Congress delayed its report until its committee had a good sense of what had happened and/or could put a good spin on events. It thus seems likely that Gen. Washington and his party had heard brief, early rumors about the Bunker Hill battle before they reached New York City.

“Your Country will do ample Justice to your Merits”

Gen. George Washington was displeased that Gen. Joseph Spencer stormed home to Connecticut in July 1775 in a snit over rank, but he probably didn’t worry too much about losing the man. The real threat was that Gen. John Thomas of Plymouth, Massachusetts (shown here, courtesy of Find a Grave), might do the same.

Since April, Thomas had been second-in-command of the provincial troops, leading the forces massed in Roxbury against a British advance down Boston Neck. There are some signs that Thomas operated almost independently of Gen. Artemas Ward in Cambridge. Observers such as James Warren of the Massachusetts government thought Thomas was the better commander. Yet the Continental Congress ranked him low on its list of brigadiers—below Gen. William Heath, who had actually been reporting to him.

Fortunately, Warren saw a solution on that same list. On 4 July he and Joseph Hawley of Northampton wrote to Washington:

As [first-ranked brigadier Seth] Pomroy is now Absent, and at the distance of an hundred miles from the Army, if it can be consistent with your Excellencys Trust and the Service to retain his Commission untill you shall receive Advice from the Continental Congress, and we shall be able to prevail with Heath to make a concession Honourable to himself, and advantageous to the publick, We humbly conceive the way would be open to do Justice to Thomas.

In sum, if we slip Thomas into Pomeroy’s top slot, then he’ll once again outrank all the other Massachusetts generals but Ward. The only man moved ahead of Thomas would then be Israel Putnam. Washington didn’t have the authority to make that change, but the suggestion made its way to Philadelphia.

For weeks Thomas stewed in Roxbury, making noises about resigning and going home. On 23 July, both Washington and the celebrated Gen. Charles Lee wrote to him about the matter. Washington said:

For the Sake of your bleeding Country, your devoted Province, your Charter rights, & by the Memory of those brave Men who have already fell in this great Cause, I conjure you to banish from your Mind every Suggestion of Anger and Disappointment: your Country will do ample Justice to your Merits—they already do it, by the Sorrow & Regret expressed on the Occasion and the Sacrifice you are called to make, will in the Judgment of every good Man, & lover of his Country, do you more real Honour than the most distinguished Victory.

Characteristically, Lee was both more expansive and more egocentric:

You think yourself not justly dealt with in the appointments of the Continental Congress. I am quite of the same opinion, but is this a time Sir, when the liberties of your country, the fate of posterity, the rights of mankind are at stake, to indulge our resentments for any ill treatment we may have received as individuals? I have myself, Sir, full as great, perhaps greater reason to complain than yourself. I have passed through the highest ranks, in some of the most respectable services in Europe. According then to modern etiquette notions of a soldier’s honor and delicacy, I ought to consider at least the preferment given to General Ward over me as the highest indignity, but I thought it my duty as a citizen and asserter of liberty, to waive every consideration.

On this principle, although a Major General of five years standing [a largely honorary rank from the king of Poland], and not a native of America, I consented to serve under General Ward, because I was taught to think that the concession would be grateful to his countrymen, and flatter myself that the concession has done me credit in the eye of the world; and can you, Sir, born in this very country, which a banditti of ministerial assassins are now attempting utterly to destroy with sword, fire and famine, abandon the defence of her, because you have been personally ill used?

Four days before, the Congress had voted to make Thomas the senior brigadier general. A backdated commission was rushed up to Massachusetts, and on 4 August the commander-in-chief was able to report, “General Thomas has accepted his Commission and I have heard nothing of his retirement since, so that I hope he is satisfied.”

TOMORROW: Dealing the generals into three piles.

“The Character of a Colony”

During the Revolutionary period, the big north-south divide within the future U.S. of A. was not at the relatively recent Mason-Dixon line defining the southern border of Pennsylvania. Rather, it was at the border between New England and New York.

East of that border, the colonies had been settled by Puritans, and were still dominated by the Congregationalist orthodoxy. Only small minorities adhered to the Church of England and Society of Friends, the largest and/or most influential religions in colonies to the south.

Landholdings in New England were relatively small and equal. The climate didn’t allow for the big cash crops of tobacco, indigo, and rice, meaning plantation slavery hadn’t taken hold. New York grants blocked expansion to the west, so the Proclamation of 1763 didn’t matter so much as it did to whites in the southern colonies.

John Adams expressed these differences to Joseph Hawley, the most prominent Patriot politician in western Massachusetts, in a letter dated 25 Nov 1775:

The Characters of Gentlemen in the four New England Colonies, differ as much from those in the others, as that of the Common People differs, that is as much as several distinct Nations almost.

Gentlemen, Men of Sense, or any Kind of Education in the other Colonies are much fewer in Proportion than in N. England. Gentlemen in the other Colonies have large Plantations of slaves, and the common People among them are very ignorant and very poor. These Gentlemen are accustomed, habituated to higher Notions of themselves and the distinction between them and the common People, than We are. And an instantaneous alteration of the Character of a Colony, and that Temper and those Sentiments which its Inhabitants imbibed with their Mothers Milk, and which have grown with their Growth and strengthened with their Strength, cannot be made without a Miracle.

I dread the Consequences of this Disimilitude of Character, and without the Utmost Caution on both sides, and the most considerate Forbearance with one another and prudent Condescention on both sides, they will certainly be fatal. An Alteration of the Southern Constitutions, which must certainly take Place if this War continues[,] will gradually bring all the Continent nearer and nearer to each other in all Respects. But this is the Most Critical Moment, We have yet seen. This Winter will cast the Die.

I should note that Adams hadn’t actually traveled south of Philadelphia yet. Fortunately for him, this was not one of his letters that fell into British hands that season, or it would probably have cost him even more allies in the Continental Congress.

The thumbnail above shows a 1775 map of New England and Long Island, available from Colonial Williamsburg.