Commemorating the Suffolk Resolves in Milton, 31 Aug.

On 6 July 1774, sixty men from towns in Berkshire County met in Stockbridge as a county convention.

On the colony’s western end, that gathering was far from the royal governor’s troops, and also beyond the powerful Loyalists of the Connecticut River valley.

I don’t think those men had been elected by their towns, so this might have been a self-appointed group of activists. They endorsed the Solemn League and Covenant boycott, and they provided a model for a new form of resistance.

County conventions thus became another way to protest Parliament’s Coercive Acts. Like court closings, they moved from west to east, moving closer to Boston and the redcoats.

The Massachusetts Government Act arrived during that time, putting new restrictions on town meetings. But that law said nothing about county meetings because there hadn’t been any before.

On 16 August 1774, men from “Every Town & District in the County of Suffolk, Except Weymouth, Cohasset, Needham & Chelsea” met at Thomas Doty’s tavern in Stoughton. (That part of town later became Canton.) At that time Suffolk County included not only Boston but also all of modern Norfolk County extending to the Rhode Island border.

However, those men decided not to proceed formally “as Several Towns Had not Appointed Delegates for the Special Purpose of a County Meeting.” Instead, they issued a call for all towns to send such delegates to a meeting “at the House of Mr. Woodward Innholder in Dedham on Tuesday the Sixth day of September.”

The owner and likely manager of that inn was actually Richard Woodward’s wife, formerly Mrs. Deborah Ames. She had run the place as a widow from 1764 to 1772, and would run it again after she and Woodward divorced in 1784.

On 6 September, the Suffolk County delegates convened and named a large committee headed by Dr. Joseph Warren, one of the several Boston delegates, to write its resolutions. Warren was a practiced newspaper essayist, and he could also build on the resolutions adopted by Berkshire, Worcester, and Middlesex Counties.

On 9 September, the Suffolk County Convention met in Milton “at the house of Mr. Daniel Vose”—another tavern. The delegates unanimously approved the resolutions Dr. Warren had drafted.

Warren then had Paul Revere carry Suffolk County Resolutions to Samuel Adams and his other colleagues in Philadelphia. There the Continental Congress had been startled by the “Powder Alarm” scare, and its members no doubt welcomed Revere’s confirmation that Boston wasn’t in ashes and was still resisting. They endorsed the resolutions, elevating that document above the other Massachusetts county declarations.

Of the three taverns associated with the Suffolk County Convention, only the Vose house survives, albeit in a different place. It’s now headquarters of the Milton Historical Society and is called the Suffolk Resolves House. 

On Sunday, 31 August, the Milton Historical Society, the Massachusetts Freemasons, and the Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Suffolk Resolves with guided tours of the Vose house, speakers, and reenactors. This event is scheduled to run from 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. Tickets are $10 per adult, $20 for a family of two adults and children under eighteen. Proceeds will benefit the Milton Historical Society.

John Linzee and “the appearance of mental derangement”

On 4 Oct 1792, about two months after giving birth to her tenth child in Boston, Susannah Linzee died. She was thirty-eight years old.

That baby, named George Inman Linzee, died the following 21 March.

His next oldest sister, Mary Inman Linzee, died on 18 May.

Within a year, retired Royal Navy captain John Linzee had lost his wife and their two youngest children. He was still responsible for six older children.

(The oldest, Samuel Hood Linzee, was by then a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He had gotten a head start in the seniority system by being listed as his father’s servant and senior clerk aboard H.M.S. Falcon in 1775, when he was less than two years old.)

The death of Linzee’s wife also led to him losing his house on Essex Street in Boston. The merchant John Rowe had left it to his niece Susannah in his will, but only after the death of his widow, Hannah Rowe.

Rowe had her own house nearby, but she decided to reclaim this one now that Susannah hadn’t survived to inherit it. In July 1794 the widow told the court she owned the

House & Land…demised to the said John Linzee for a Term that is past, after which it ought to return to her again, but the said John Linzee still withholds the said House & Land & their appurtenances

She sued the retired captain for £1,000. Sheriff Jeremiah Allen certified that he had “attached a chair as the property of the within named John Linzee and left a summons at his last and usual place of Abode.”

John William Linzee’s 1917 history of the family reprints a couple of documents from that court case but doesn’t show how it was resolved. He declared, “this disagreement was of short duration,” pointing to how Hannah Rowe left bequests to the Linzee children. However, that will was written in 1803, after John Linzee had died. It would be just as consistent with Hannah Rowe strong-arming him out of the scene and raising her great-nephews and great-nieces herself.

In fact, there’s evidence that the death of his wife cast Linzee into a depression that alienated him from people. The merchant Samuel Breck, who praised the captain as “a good officer” in earlier years, recalled:

At her death the eccentricities of the captain assumed the appearance of mental derangement. He retired to a small box in the neighborhood of Milton, where he lived entirely by himself, rode out armed, and tapped his cider-cask by firing a ball into the head.

As he was seldom to be seen at home, he fixed a parcel of hooks in his kitchen for the butchers to hang their meat on, giving a standing order to put daily a joint upon one of the hooks. It so happened on one occasion, when he was detained in Boston about a fortnight by sickness, that he found on his return home fifteen or sixteen pieces of meat hanging around the walls of his kitchen.

Linzee died in 1798. He left his estate, worth almost $18,000, to his children and grandchildren and asked to be buried next to his wife.

The Linzees’ oldest daughter, Hannah, married Thomas C. Amory. Their son John Inman Linzee served as treasurer of Massachusetts. A granddaughter married a grandson of Dr. John Warren, a great-granddaughter married a grandson of Paul Revere, and, as I wrote here, another granddaughter married a grandson of William Prescott.

“To wait upon the Messrs. Hutchinsons at Milton”

Over the two days of 5–6 Nov 1773, the Boston town meeting tried to finish the job an informal committee of businessmen (and rioters) had failed to do: convince the East India Company’s agents in Boston to resign from that responsibility.

The first step was getting those men to actually admit to having been appointed. Although there were plenty of reports that the company had decided to sell its tea through Thomas and Elisha Hutchinson, Richard Clarke and Sons, and Benjamin Faneuil and Joshua Winslow, no official paperwork had arrived.

Furthermore, those merchants were keeping low profiles after their confrontation with the crowd on 3 November.

The official record of the town meeting describe how that effort played out.

On the morning of 5 November, the meeting named a high-powered committee to ask those agents to resign: John Hancock as meeting moderator; merchants Henderson Inches, Benjamin Austin, and Jonathan Mason; and all the selectmen—Hancock again, plus John Scollay, Timothy Newell, Thomas Marshall, Oliver Wendell, Samuel Austin, and John Pitts.

Those men evidently went out with their message during the dinner break. At 3:00 P.M. the town meeting resumed with the committee’s report that Clarke and Faneuil had declined to respond on the excuse that they couldn’t consult with the Hutchinson brothers, who were out at their father’s house in Milton.

The meeting then named Samuel Adams, William Molineux, and Dr. Joseph Warren—three men not currently active as merchants but among the most radical political leaders—to deliver a more forceful demand to Clarke and Faneuil. They came back with a promise of a reply in half an hour.

The gathering then decided that Hancock, Pitts, Adams, Warren, William Powell, and Nathaniel Appleton would go out to Milton with the same message for the Hutchinsons.

Someone brought in Clarke and Faneuil’s written message on behalf of their firms. Those men stated that since they didn’t yet have the details of the tea consignment, they couldn’t comply with the town’s request. The town unanimously voted that response unsatisfactory.

The meeting resumed the next day at 11:00 A.M., “still continuing very full.” Town clerk William Cooper recorded:

The Committee appointed to wait upon the Messrs. Hutchinsons at Milton—Reported—That they had enquired the last Evening and this Morning at the House of Elish Hutchinson Esq. in this Town, and were informed that those Gentlemen were at Milton;

the Committee proceeded this Morning to Milton and calling at the Governors Seat were informed that only Mr. Elisha Hutchinson lodged there the last Night, who had set out early this Morning for Boston;

on their return they called at his House, and were told that he had been at home this Morning but had again set off for Milton—

they then went to the House of Thomas Hutchinson Esq. who was then at home, where they read and delivered to him an attested Copy of the Towns Vote, when he acquainted the Committee, that the Town might expect his answer in one quarter of an Hour—

The following Letter was soon after sent into the Moderator, signed Thomas Hutchinson, which was read, vizt.

Sir

I have nothing relative to the Teas referred to in the request or Vote of the Town, except that one of my Friends has signified to me by Letter, that part of it he had reason to believe would be Consigned to me and my Brother Jointly, but upon what terms he could not then say——

Under these circumstances I can give no other answer to the Town, at present, then that if the Teas should arrive & we should be appointed Factors, we shall then be sufficiently informed to answer the request of the Town—

I am for my Brother & self
Sir Your humble Servant
T. Hutchinson Junr.

The meeting voted that unsatisfactory with no dissent. Then the citizens declared, once against unanimously, that all the tea consignees’ behavior was “Daringly Affrontive.” They voted to send the record of this meeting to every town in Massachusetts, and thus to the newspapers.

There was one last action:

A Motion was then made, that the Thanks of the Town be given to the Honble. John Hancock Esq. the Moderator of this Meeting for the dispatch he has given to the Business thereof—but the Motion was objected to by himself and Mr. Adams, and it seemed to be the sense of the Town, that a Vote of Thanks should be only given upon very special and signal services performed for the Publick——

Hancock and his colleagues had, after all, simply been carrying out their duties as patriotic citizens. (Though I’m sure Hancock enjoyed the gesture of public praise.)

Meanwhile, in between those two town meeting sessions Boston had observed its traditional Pope Night.

TOMORROW: And how had that gone?

(The picture above, courtesy of the Milton Historical Society, is the only known image of Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s country mansion in Milton, where his son Elisha spent the night of 5 Nov 1773. John Ritto Penniman painted this picture in 1827, so it shows the house as it existed fifty years after the Revolution, having perhaps been remodeled.)

“The 5th. of Novr. being a day of disorder”

On 3 Nov 1773, as I described back in 2019, Boston saw its first tea-inspired violence.

The Sons of Liberty, using a note signed “O.C.,” had summoned half a dozen merchants to meet under Liberty Tree and resign their appointments as agents to sell the East India Company’s tea. Those activists were following the playbook of the first Stamp Act protest from August 1765.

When no merchants showed up, however, William Molineux led a crowd to the warehouse of Richard Clarke (shown here) and demanded a reply. Then they demanded entry, shoving their way inside.

Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, father of two of the tea agents and a more distant relative of others, described how that confrontation ended:

Mr. [Nathaniel] Hatch a gentleman of Dorchester & a Justice of peace commanded the peace & required them to disperse [i.e., Hatch read the Riot Act] but they hooted at him & after a blow from one of them he was glad to retreat. I was all the time in the Council chamber with as many gentlemen of the Council as I could get together but could not make a Quorum.

The mob, after they found the gentlemen determined, began to separate and thereupon a number of gentlemen, who were in the Street, went through those that remained, joined the Gentlemen who were with the consignees in the Warehouse, & guarded them through the mob who were discouraged from offering any further violence.

The next morning I met the Council who advised me, unanimously, to direct the Attorney General [Jonathan Sewall] to prosecute such persons as upon inquiry into this tumult should appear to him to have been Offenders and, as I am informed the Justice has evidence of the person who struck him, I doubt not I can prevail with him to bring forward a separate prosecution of that Offence.

The gentlemen of the town have shewn more resolution upon this occasion than I have known before and, hitherto, nothing has been done which can bring any imputation upon the Town in general. I wish the Select men had discountenanced the proceeding. I am informed a Town meeting is intended to morrow. I wish nothing may be done there which shall oblige me to give your Lordship a less favorable account.

Indeed, the selectmen’s records for 4 November read:

The Selectmen having receiving a Petition from a number of the Inhabitants praying that a Town Meeting may be called immediately for the purpose set forth in their Petition, whereupon,

Voted, that the Town Clerk [William Cooper] issue his Warrant for a Town Meeting Fryday next 10 O’Clock.

“Fryday next” meant the next day. That was also the 5th of November, or Pope Night, when Boston’s youth paraded with effigies of the enemies of the day, collecting money, before having a big rumble and bonfire.

Hutchinson wrote:

The 5th. of Novr. being a day of disorder, every year, in the town of Boston one of my sons thought it advisable to remove with his family to the Lieutenant Governor’s in town, the other came to me in the Country.

In other words, Thomas Hutchinson, Jr., went to his father-in-law Andrew Oliver’s house in Boston, and Elisha Hutchinson left town for his father’s mansion in Milton. Other tea consignees probably took similar protection action.

A town meeting was the most official way for Boston to take political action while the Pope Night processions were the least respectable. How would that Friday play out?

TOMORROW: The 5th of November in 1773.

Three Ways to Misquote John Adams

There are a number of problems with the claims in The Memoirs of Gen. Joseph Gardner Swift (1890), quoted back here, about the last months of the general’s grandfather, Samuel Swift.

That book told a dramatic story of Swift starting to organize an uprising against the British troops inside besieged Boston, only to be punished by being kept from his family and dying of illness as a result. It also credited that story to John Adams, a highly respected source who definitely knew Swift.

According to the section of that book in Joseph G. Swift’s own voice, Adams told him on 8 Oct 1817 about his grandfather: “I have written to Mr. [William] Wirt my opinion of the merits of that Whig, who fell a martyr to the fury of [Thomas] Gage.”

Adams’s first letter to Wirt did indeed mention Samuel Swift. However, Adams didn’t write that letter until 5 Jan 1818, three months after J. G. Swift’s well documented visit to Quincy.

Indeed, according to this letter from Thomas Cooper to Thomas Jefferson, as of 30 September Wirt’s biography of Patrick Henry was still in press; “about 100 pages are printed.” That was one week before Swift was in Quincy, leaving not enough time for Adams to get that book, read it, and resolve to write to the author.

J. G. Swift’s memory of what Adams said (or genealogist Harrison Ellery’s rendition of that memory) must therefore have been shaped by later knowledge of Adams’s letter, which was published in 1819.

As quoted back here, the general wrote to Adams in 1824, asking for any details about his grandfather. That shows he hadn’t heard the story of the uprising by then. But there’s no evidence that Adams ever wrote back, much less sent the dramatic story printed in that family memoir. At the time Adams was busy telling stories about heroic Boston lawyers in the Revolution, yet none of his other letters includes this story about Swift, either.

The Memoirs of Gen. Joseph Gardner Swift was sloppy about citing Adams in other ways. In the genealogical section Ellery wrote that Adams called Samuel Swift “a martyr to freedom’s cause.” But the J. G. Swift memoir says Adams actually said “martyr to the fury of Gage.” The “martyr to freedom’s cause” phrase came from A. K. Teele’s History of Milton. (Neither phrase appears in the surviving Adams Papers.)

Not that Teele’s book was on more solid ground. It followed James M. Robbins’s 1862 address on the history of Milton by quoting Adams this way: “Among the illustrious men who were agents in the Revolution must be remembered the name of Samuel Swift.”

In fact, Adams’s 1818 letter to Wirt said [emphases added]:

And in imitation of your example I would introduce Portraits of a long Catalogue of illustrious Men, who were Agents in the Revolution

Jeremiah Gridley the Father of the Bar in Boston and the Preceptor of Prat Otis Thatcher Cushing and many others; Benjamin Prat Chief Justice of New York James Otis of Boston Oxenbridge Thatcher Jonathan Sewal Attorney General and Judge of Admiralty Samuel Quincy Solicitor General, Daniel Leonard, Josiah Quincy Richard Dana and Francis Dana his Son, Minister to Russia and afterwards Chief Justice, Jonathan Mayhew D.D. Samuel Cooper D.D. James Warren and Joseph Warren, John Winthrop Professor at Harvard Colledge, And Member of Counsal, Samuel Dexter the Father John Worthington of Springfield Joseph Hawley of Northampton, Governors Huchenson Hancock Bowdoin Adams Sullivan and Gerry Lieutenant Governor Oliver Chief Justice Oliver, Judge Edmund Trowbridge Judge William Cushing, and Timothy Ruggles ought not to be omitted. The Military Characters Ward Lincoln Warren Knox Brooks & Heath &c must come in of Course. Not should Benjamin Kent, Samuel Swift or John Read be forgotten.

Adams named thirty-eight prominent men, some of them Loyalists and all but one occurring to him before he came to Samuel Swift.

[I’m not going to bother adding H.T.M.L. links for all those guys.]

TOMORROW: Examining the legend itself.

Samuel Swift, Established Lawyer

Samuel Swift was a member of colonial Boston’s legal establishment—son of a Milton militia colonel and town representative (gravestone shown here), graduate of Harvard College, trained in the law by Jeremy Gridley.

Swift was a member of the St. John’s Lodge of Freemasons. John Adams recorded dining with him several times. John Rowe listed him as socializing with “the Possee,” a merchants’ club. 

Swift also maintained friendly relations with Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, who had an estate in Milton. In fact, two weeks after the Tea Party, Swift sent the governor a note (now lost) which prompted this reply:

I am obliged to you for the favorable opinion you express, in your letter of the 30 Dec, of my general disposition, and I think you will be satisfied of the propriety of my conduct in the particular instance you refer to, when I put you in mind that I have taken a solemn oath, as Governor, to do every thing in my power that the Acts of trade may be carried into execution. Now to have granted a pass to a Vessel which I knew had not cleared at the Custom house would have been such a direct countenancing & encouraging the violation of the Acts of Trade that I believe you would have altered your opinion of me and seen me ever after in an unfavorable light. I am sure if I could have preserved the property that is destroyed, or could have complied with the general desire of the people consistent with the duty which my station requires I would most readily have done it.

Reading backward, it appears Swift wrote that he generally admired Hutchinson’s adherence to the law, but that he should have been more flexible in this case. By that time, the most fervent Boston politicians had decided Hutchinson was two-faced and corrupt, so they wouldn’t have sent any praise.

Swift’s name appears on many Boston town committees over the years, but those rarely involved radical political action. He was in the group designated to invite James Lovell to deliver an oration commemorating the Massacre in April 1771, and the group tasked with responding to the remarks in the “Hutchinson Letters” in 1773. On those committees Swift’s role was to add establishment heft, not to plan tough action.

Swift’s letters to John Adams show that he grew more radical in the last months before the war. On 20 Oct 1774 he even said, “I am no Swordsman but with my Gun or flail I fear no man more especially my Cause being Good as I think other wise I would not engage.” Still, Swift wrote more in those letters about the wording of pamphlets and about food than about military preparations.

On 13 Mar 1775, Swift also told Adams, “I am in a Measure Confin’d,” hinting at some infirmity. He was fifty-nine years old. Nonetheless, on 3 April when Boston had a town meeting and Samuel Adams was busy at Concord, the inhabitants chose Swift to be their “Moderator of this Meeting Pro Tempore.”

Two weeks later, the province was at war. Two months after that, Adams complained about not having received a letter from Swift since he had departed for Philadelphia.

On 30 August, Samuel Swift died inside besieged Boston.

In his last decades, John Adams, now a former President, wrote letters listing Swift among the Boston lawyers who had advocated resistance to the Crown’s new laws. Adams was pushing a version of the Revolution which emphasized Massachusetts moving before Virginia, the legal profession leading the people instead of being pulled along, and, incidentally, himself near the center of events.

Adams’s telling did include Swift, but that man’s name appeared at the end of a long list of other men. In another letter, Adams recalled that when he said the bar shouldn’t provide a polite farewell address to Hutchinson at the end of his time as governor, “Samuel Swift Esquire, as if appalled and astonished, Sat mute.” I’m not saying any of Adams’s memories was fully reliable, but they were definitely mixed.

TOMORROW: A descendant seeking answers.

Rewards Offered in 1798

As quoted yesterday, in July 1798 David Stoddard Greenough offered a “ONE DOLLAR REWARD” for the return of his teen-aged indentured servant Dick Welsh.

I wanted to know how that compared to rewards other newspaper advertisements announced for other people. So I looked up the word “reward” in Massachusetts newspapers from June and July 1798.

Here’s what advertisements offered for people of different sorts, sorted from smallest reward to largest:

• John Scofield, 19 years old, indented to John Neat, Boston: 1¢.
• Eber Potter, 15, indented to Eliel Gilbert, Greenfield: 1¢.
• Stephen Mulforde, 13, indented to Daniel Pepper, Boston: 1¢.
• Elisha Roberts, 16, indented to cordwainer Enoch Mower, Lynn: 1¢.
• Silas Nowell, boy, indented to printer Edmund M. Blunt, Newburyport: 5¢.
• Jacob Phelps, 16, indented to Jonathan Whitney: 6¢.
• Joseph Larrabee, 19, indented to John Newhall, Lynn: 20¢.
• John Sturgis, 16, from the sloop Nancy: $4.
• Walter Spooner Belcher, 18, indented to carpenter Marlborough Ripley: $5.
• John Holbrook, 22, and Ebenezer Hollis, 20, soldiers deserting from Castle Island: $8.
• Prince, 20, enslaved to Joseph Willcox, 2d, Killingworth, Connecticut: $10.
• Ebenezer Buckling, 19, indented to papermaker Hugh McLean, Milton: $20.
• John Barton, adult, sailor who had taken $20 advance pay from Capt. Stephen Curtis: $20.
• John Wilcot, adult, accused of stealing a horse from Caleb Easty: $50 for man and horse, $30 for horse and tackle alone.
• Frank, 25, sailor enslaved to Elijah Grinnelds of Virginia: $50.
• Joseph Haslett, adult, suspected forger: $100.

Greenough’s one-dollar reward for Dick Welsh was much more than some masters offered for their missing apprentices, but that probably reflected Greenough’s wish to be seen as a wealthy landed gentleman. He could afford to toss out a dollar where other men offered only a penny.

Nonetheless, Greenough’s message was probably the same as that from Neat, Gilbert, and the other masters at the top of the list above: this runaway is worthless, and I bought this newspaper notice only as a legality and to make life on the run more difficult for the lad.

For pocketbooks, horses, watches, and other property, people offered substantial rewards—sometimes for the goods alone, sometimes more for the goods and the thieves. Greenough himself advertised a $50 reward in May 1791 for thieves who had broken into his house and stolen a lot of gold and silver items. For people who could just walk away again, not so much.

It’s notable that masters were willing to pay far more for enslaved workers than apprentices. After all, those black men had taken many more years of free labor away with them. Not until the case of the slave-child Med in 1836 did Massachusetts law hold that people enslaved in other states became free if their owners brought them into the commonwealth.

One last observation: Ebenezer Buckling must have learned a lot of the valuable trade of papermaking to be worth $20.

Elisha Horton, Litchfield’s Tea Partier

As I looked for evidence of Elijah Houghton at the Boston Tea Party, I noticed that right before him on the more expansive lists was Elisha Horton.

In an old Yankee dialect, those names sound awfully similar. I half-wondered if people heard “Elisha Horton” and thought it meant “Elijah Houghton.” 

But Elisha Horton’s name doesn’t appear on the lists in Traits of the Tea Party or Francis S. Drake’s Tea Leaves, either. So I did more digging.

Elisha Horton was born on 11 Feb 1757 in Milton, son of Enoch and Hepzibah Horton.

That town was the site of Massachusetts’s first paper mill, set up in 1731. By 1763 those mills were said to be “in a ruinous Condition,” but because a supply of paper was “very advantageous to the Province” the Massachusetts General Court granted mill owners James Boies and Richard Clarke £100 to rebuild. Daniel Vose, Stephen Crane, and others added more mills in 1771 and 1773, which required more workers. 

I mention those mills because in later life Horton ran a paper mill in Litchfield, Connecticut. That suggests he spent his teen years training at the papermaking complex in Milton, but there’s no certain evidence of that.

The Rev. A. K. Teele’s 1887 history of Milton includes a “Muster Roll of Capt Daniel Voses Company of the Train in Milton of Col. [Lemuel] Robinsons Regiment that traveled to Roxbury and served as a Standing Company in the defence of Liberty before the Standing Army was compleated after the battle of Concord.”

One of the matrosses, or artillery privates, on that militia list was Elisha Horton. Those men served one to three months at the start of the siege of Boston.

That was quite possibly the eighteen-year-old Elisha Horton, but he didn’t mention that time when he applied for a Revolutionary War pension in 1818. Then again, he didn’t have to since he could point to continuous service in the Continental Army from February 1777 to June 1784. During that time Horton rose from private to sergeant major to ensign, the lowest level of officer. With his pension application he included his commission signed by Thomas McKean as president of the Continental Congress.

By 1788 Horton settled in Salisbury, Connecticut. Four years later he moved to the Bantam Lake area of Litchfield, where the merchant Julius Deming had financed a paper mill. From then until 1818 Horton managed that mill, becoming a co-owner after 1806. He and his wife Hannah helped to found the town’s Methodist Episcopal Society.

In 1818 Elisha Horton retired from and sold his interest in the mill. He then supported himself on his local property holdings. He also applied for a pension from the federal government for his Revolutionary service.

Hannah Horton died in 1824, and in the following year the sexagenarian Elisha married a woman in her early thirties named Marilla Bradley. Ultimately she lived until 1860, applying for a federal pension as a Revolutionary soldier’s widow.

Elisha Horton died on 30 Nov 1837. His estate was listed as insolvent, possibly because of the financial panic of that year. But he was still respected by his neighbors, and the 9 December Connecticut Courant ran this death notice:

In Litchfield, on the 30th ult. [last month], Mr. Elisha Horton, aged 81—a revolutionary officer and pensioner. He was one among the two or three survivors of those daring spirits who were engaged in throwing the tea into Boston harbor previous to the declaration of independence—the first overt act which preceded the revolution.

When two Boston newspapers, the Courier and the Traveler, reported Horton’s death the following week, they identified him as a “native of Boston” and a Revolutionary officer, but they didn’t mention the Tea Party. Did that mean the publishers of those papers didn’t believe that aspect of his life?

By 1837 Joshua Wyeth had coined the term “Tea Party,” and George Robert Twelves Hewes had become celebrated for his two as-told-to books about it. The event was famous. More and more people were trying to connect themselves or their ancestors to it. Eventually being at the Tea Party was almost a requirement for being a Patriot in Boston, producing false or exaggerated claims.

Was Horton truly involved in destroying the tea? It would have been unusual for a teen-aged apprentice from Milton to get into the action at Griffin’s Wharf—though not impossible. Did young Elisha witness the event, or pass on stories about it, and his neighbors came to assume he’d been part of it? Did Horton claim to be involved to bolster his patriotic reputation, knowing that no one in Litchfield was likely to contradict him?

Given his long service in the Continental Army and his local stature, I doubt Elisha Horton felt a strong need to burnish his credentials. However, we can’t assess the stories he told his neighbors since they don’t survive. We can’t be certain the report of him being part of the Tea Party is true, but we do know it dates back to 1837.

Finding Jurors for the Boston Massacre Trial

On 27 Nov 1770, 250 years ago today, the second trial for the Boston Massacre got under way.

It was supposed to start a week earlier, but the court had trouble finding twelve jurors who were ready to sit on what promised to be an unusually long, unusually charged trial.

The defense team was giving the jurors extra scrutiny. Acting governor Thomas Hutchinson wrote to Gen. Thomas Gage in New York:

My great concern is to obtain an unbiased Jury and for that purpose, principally, I advised Captain [Thomas] Preston to engage one of the Bar, over and above the Council to conduct the Cause in Court, in the character of an Attorney who should make a very diligent inquiry into the characters and principles of all who are returned which he has done and it may be to good purpose, but after all it will be extremely difficult to keep a Jury to the Rules of Law.

That appears to be the reason that the young solicitor Sampson Salter Blowers joined John Adams and Josiah Quincy, Jr., on the defense team. (Blowers appears above later in life, when he was a judge in Nova Scotia.) Robert Auchmuty, senior counsel for the defense in Preston’s trial, saw his job as done.

The defense lawyers challenged every potential juror from Boston as too close to the case. After all, the town was paying Robert Treat Paine to be a special prosecutor. And the judges accepted those challenges. As a result, the jurors all had to come from other towns in Suffolk County (which at that time included all of present-day Norfolk County as well as Hingham). 

The trial record, which is unusually thick for the eighteenth century and published in volume 3 of The Legal Papers of John Adams and thus on Founders Online, shows the difficulty in seating a jury of twelve. The men called were: 

• Samuel Williams, Roxbury, challenged for cause.
• Joseph Curtis, Roxbury, challenged for cause.
• Nathaniel Davis, Roxbury, sworn.
• Joseph Mayo, Roxbury, sworn.
• Abraham Wheeler, Dorchester, sworn.
• Edward Pierce, Dorchester, sworn.
• William Glover, Dorchester, challenged peremptorily.
• Isaiah Thayer, Braintree, sworn.
• Samuel Bass, Jr., Braintree, challenged peremptorily.
• James Faxen, Braintree, challenged peremptorily.
• Benjamin Fisher, Dedham, sworn.
• John Morse, Dedham, challenged peremptorily.
• James White, Medway, challenged peremptorily.
• Nehemiah Davis, Brookline, challenged peremptorily.
• Samuel Davenport, Milton, sworn.
• Joseph Houghton, Milton, sworn.
• James Richardson, Medfield, challenged peremptorily.
• John Billings, Stoughton, challenged peremptorily.
• Joseph Richards, Stoughton, challenged for cause.
• Consider Atherton, Stoughton, sworn.
• Abner Turner, Walpole, challenged peremptorily.

The clerk then called the Boston men whose names were at the bottom of that list, and the defendants challenged them all.

• John Brown, Boston, challenged for cause.
• Joseph Barrell, Boston, challenged for cause.
• Silas Aitkins, Boston, challenged for cause.
• Harbottle Dorr, Boston, challenged for cause.

The judges had Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf bring in more men, and the process resumed.

• Samuel Sheppard, Boston, challenged peremptorily.
• John Goldsbury, Boston, challenged for cause.
• Samuel Peck, Boston, challenged for cause.
• William Gouge, challenged for cause.
• Joseph Turrell, Boston, challenged for cause.
• Jacob Cushing, Jr., Hingham, sworn.
• Josiah Lane, Hingham, sworn.
• Jonathan Burr, Hingham, sworn.

Finally, the court officers did a little legal maneuvering to ensure the last three men from Hingham were indeed eligible, and the opening arguments began.

Joseph Mayo (1721-1776) of Roxbury was named foreman of the jury. He owned a large farm a little past the intersection of modern Washington Street and South Street in Roslindale. A veteran of the Louisbourg expedition of 1745, he was a captain of his town’s militia company. Mayo had also served on town committees to promote non-importation and to instruct the Massachusetts General Court representatives to stand up for the province’s charter rights. But the defense team felt, based on their inquiry, that he could assess the case fairly.

Dr. Charles Hall, Regimental Surgeon, and Cleft Lips

On 6 Sept 1770, 250 years ago today, the Boston News-Letter carried this news item:

A few weeks since the Operation for the Hare-Lip was performed to great Perfection on a young Man in Milton near Brush-Hill; and a Child in Boston has received as much Benefit from the Operation as the Case would admit of, by Mr. HALL Surgeon to the 14th Regiment.——

The Impression these unhappy Sights are apt to make on married Women, should be an Inducement to have this Defect in Nature rectified early in Life, as there are numerous Instances of the Mother’s Affection having impressed her Offspring with the like Deformity.

This event shows up in histories of plastic surgery as the earliest recorded American examples of operations to repair cleft lips. It’s striking how that medical breakthrough was still accompanied by an antique warning that the condition was contagious—pregnant women might see people with cleft lips and pass the trait on to their babies!

The surgeon who did these operations was Dr. Charles Hall. He had cared for the men of the 14th Regiment at least since 1758, when he was in his late twenties. In 1768, while the regiment was in Halifax, Hall treated one soldier for a compound fracture of the arm, sawing off “between two and three inches of the whole substance of the Tibia” but reporting that after about five months that limb was “but very little shorter than the other.” Eighteenth-century medicine was not for the faint-hearted.

Dr. Hall presumably came to Boston with the regiment in October 1768. He shows up in the town’s Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, in the deposition of leather-dresser Ephraim Fenno:

on Friday the ninth instant [i.e., of March], as I was going home by the hospital in the Common, I saw Doctor Hall, surgeon of the 14th regiment, looking out of his window, who said to me, dirty travelling, neighbour!

Yes, Sir, returned I.

He asked me what news in town?

I told him I heard nothing but what he knew already, that the talk was about the people that were murdered.

He then asked me if the people of the town were not easier?

I replied, I believed not, nor would be till all the soldiers had left the town.

He then asked me, if I heard whether the 14th regiment was going?

I answered, yes—for the people would not Be quiet till they were all gone.

He said, the town’s people had always used the soldiers ill, which occasioned this affair; and said, I wish, that instead of killing five or six, they had killed five hundred, damn me if I don’t.

Weeks after the Boston Massacre, the 14th Regiment moved to Castle William, and Dr. Hall probably went with them.

The Boston News-Letter article about Hall’s surgeries on cleft lips provided a little positive press for the army. The reference to “Brush-Hill” is notable; that was acting governor Thomas Hutchinson’s country estate.

The 14th Regiment remained at Castle William until 1772, then went to St. Vincent. In 1775, at the start of the Revolutionary War, its men fought at the Battle of Great Bridge in Virginia. The next year, the 14th was part of Gen. William Howe’s force at New York, and in 1777 the regiment returned to Britain to recruit more men.

Toward the end of the war, in 1782, the Crown sent the 14th Regiment to Jamaica. Dr. Charles Hall was promoted from the regiment to the army hospital on that island on Christmas Day. One year later he retired, going on half-pay. In 1795 the doctor wrote a letter from Nantwich, a small town in central England. Hall died in 1805 at the age of seventy-six.

(The picture above comes from a 1748 French manual of surgery, shown in Blaire O. Rogers’s “Treatment of Cleft Lip and Palate during The Revolutionary War,” downloadable as a P.D.F. file.)

“Nothing Remaining but the bare walls & floors”

As evening fell on Monday, 26 Aug 1765, crowds started to gather on the streets of Boston.

It was twelve days after the town’s first big protest against the Stamp Act and the provincial stamp agent, Andrew Oliver. Back then, some men had threatened to attack Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s house in the North End as well but had been dissuaded.

This time, the crowd first went to the home of Customs official Charles Paxton. His landlord convinced them not to harm that property, as I wrote back on the sestercentennial of that event. But the men did more damage at the houses of William Story, Benjamin Hallowell, and Ebenezer Richardson. Then they headed up to the Hutchinson mansion.

The lieutenant governor left several descriptions of the night which, since he was a royal official and historian, have always been included in the story of the Revolution. Here, from the Colonial Society of Massachusetts’s ongoing project to publish Hutchinson’s letters, is one of his most detailed descriptions of the event, in a letter to Richard Jackson in London dated 30 August:

In the evening whilst I was at supper & my children round me somebody ran in & said the mob were coming.

I directed my children to fly to a secure place & shut up my house as I had done before intending not to quit it but my eldest daughter [Sally] repented her leaving me & hastened back & protested she would not quit the house unless I did. I could not stand against this and withdrew with her to a neighbouring house where I had been but a few minutes before the hellish crew fell upon my house with the Rage of devils & in a moment with axes split down the door & entred.

My son [which one?] being in the great entry heard them cry damn him he is upstairs we’ll have him. Some ran immediately as high as the top of the house others filled the rooms below and cellars & others Remained without the house to be employed there.

Messages soon came one after another to the house where I was to inform me the mob were coming in pursuit of me and I was obliged to retire thro yards & gardens to a house more remote where I remained until 4 o’clock by which time one of the best finished houses in the province had nothing Remaining but the bare walls & floors.

Not contented with tearing off all the wainscot & hangings & splitting the doors to pieces they beat down the partition walls & altho that alone cost them near two hours they cut down the cupola or lanthern and they began to take the slate & boards from the roof & were prevented only by the approaching day light from a total demolition of the building. The garden fence was laid flat & all my trees &c broke down to the ground. Such ruins were never seen in America.

Besides my plate & family pictures houshold furniture of every kind my own my children and servants apparel they carried off about £900— sterling in money & emptied the house of every thing whatsoever except a part of the kitchen furniture not leaving a single book or paper in it & have scattered or destroyed all the manuscripts & other papers I had been collecting for 30 years together besides a great number of publick papers in my custody.

The evening being warm I had undressed me & slipt on a thin camlet surtout over my wastcoat, the next morning the weather being changed I had not cloaths enough in my possession to defend me from the cold & was obliged to borrow from my friends.

Many articles of cloathing & good part of my plate have since been picked up in different quarters of the town but the furniture in general was cut to pieces before it was thrown out of the house & most of the beds cut open & the feathers thrown out of the windows.

The next evening I intended with my children to Milton but meeting two or three small parties of the Ruffians who I suppose had concealed themselves in the country and my coachman hearing one of them say, there he is, my daughters were terrified & said they should never be safe and I was forced to shelter them that night at the castle.

Hutchinson detailed his losses in a petition to the Massachusetts General Court, to be read here. That document indicates that the mansion was also home to:

• Hutchinson’s sister-in-law, Grizzell Sanford
• sons Thomas (aged 25), Elisha (22), and William Sanford (13)
• daughters Sally (21) and Peggy (11)
• housekeeper Rebeckah Whitmore
• maid Susannah Townsend
• coachman Moses Vose
• “negro” Mark 
• Mrs. Walker, “a widow woman to whom I had allowed a living in the house several years”

For more detail about the house and its furnishings, see John W. Tyler’s analysis, “Such Ruins Were Never Seen in America.”

“Enraged upon reading Capt. Preston’s Narrative”

The publication of Capt. Thomas Preston’s “Case” in Boston in June 1770 heightened the danger that had prompted the captain to write to the British government in the first place: the possibility that he would be killed for the Boston Massacre.

One threat was that a Massachusetts jury would convict Preston of murder and the local authorities would quickly carry out a death sentence. The 21 June Boston News-Letter reported that the government in London had anticipated that possibility:

The Ministers expect, That if Captain Preston, and the soldiers, who committed the late murders at Boston, are condemned, That the Lieutenant Governor (Hutchinson) will respite them during the King’s pleasure [i.e., put off executions until the London government had a chance to pardon them], which may occasion another Porteu’s affair)

John Porteous was a captain of the Edinburgh City Guard in 1736. After he and soldiers under his command killed people while putting down a riot, he was convicted of murder. Rumors said he might be reprieved, so on the night before his scheduled execution a crowd took him out of the jail (shown above) and hanged him themselves.

Thus, the second danger that Preston and the ministry feared was that Bostonians would lynch him.

On 22 June, 250 years ago today, Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wrote to Gen. Thomas Gage in New York:

I ever supposed it would be necessary for me, at all events if Capt. Preston & the Soldiers should be found Guilty and Sentence be passed to grant a Reprieve until His Majesty’s pleasure should be known. I am now under stronger Obligation to do it than before having received His Majestys express commands so to do.

I am much less concerned from an apprehension of the rage of the people against me than I am from the danger in our present dissolute state of Government, of the people’s taking upon themselves to put the Sentence into execution. I do not believe I have one Magistrate who would be willing to run any risque in endeavouring to prevent it. If Troops were in the Town I don’t know that a Magistrate would employ them on such an occasion but I think they might notwithstanding be the means of preventing it.

Hutchinson sent that letter from Boston and then went to his country house in Milton. As evening approached, he received a message from Lt. Col. William Dalrymple, commander of the 14th Regiment stationed on Castle William. Dalrymple enclosed “a Letter he had received from Capt. Preston expressing his great fears that the people were so enraged as to force the Gaol that night and make him a sacrifice, several of his friends having informed him this was their intention.”

The acting governor dashed off a note for Preston which said in its entirety:

Dear Sir

I will take every precaution which is in my power which I wish was greater than it is and am Yours sincerely

TH

Hutchinson told Gage the next day what other steps he took:

I sent immediately proper Orders to the Sheriff [Stephen Greenleaf] & I directed to every precaution I could think of but, being extremely uneasy, I went to Town. I found the people were enraged upon reading Capt. Preston’s Narrative which I wish had not been published in England.

I sat up until midnight and until the Scouts which had been sent to different quarters made return that all was quiet and I find that where Capt. Prestons fears have come to the knowledge of the Liberty People they have generally remarked that what ever danger there may be after Trial it would be the heighth of madness to think of any such thing before.

I shall however continue all the caution I have in my power.

Hutchinson thought Preston’s trial for murder would come in “ten or twelve weeks,” or sometime in September. Both the royal authorities and Boston’s political leaders had to keep him and the soldiers alive until then.

“The Grand Jury haveing found bills against them”

As I recounted back here, the Suffolk County grand jury inquiring into the Boston Massacre took a lot of testimony about whether people had fired down at the crowd from the Customs House behind the soldiers.

The foreman of that grand jury was William Taylor of Milton. (At the time, Suffolk County included all of present-day Norfolk County, so most of its population was outside Boston.)

According to A. K. Teele’s History of Milton, Taylor was born in Jamaica in 1714. His older brother John became Milton’s minister in 1729, and William went into business as a merchant in Boston, living on Cornhill near the Old Brick Meeting-House.

(It looks like another William Taylor was warden at King’s Chapel early in the century, and another William Taylor was a sea captain sailing in and out of the harbor, and another William Taylor had a mercantile store on Long Wharf and became a Loyalist.)

The Rev. John Taylor died in early 1750, and William advertised many times in the Boston newspapers over the next few years to sell and then rent property in Milton. He described that estate as “suitable for a Gentleman’s Seat, being but 8 Miles from the Town of Boston.” Also in the 1750s he paid Joseph Blackburn to paint his portrait, shown above.

William Taylor was active in Boston’s militia regiment, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel in December 1764. He also held offices in the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company and served for one year as a fireward.

In late 1765, Col. Taylor remarried, to the widow Sarah (Cheever) Savage. The following summer, the Taylors left Boston, apparently moving to that “Gentleman’s Seat” in Milton. His name then appears mainly in advertisements promoting land in Pownalborough, Maine. Thus, while Taylor was a country gentleman as he led the grand jury in 1770, he had close ties to the Boston elite.

After war broke out in 1775, soldiers broke into Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s uninhabited mansion in Milton and found a trunk of letters, among other things. Col. Taylor took charge of that property. The letters went into the Massachusetts state archives while other goods “were sold at auction, at the barn of Col. Taylor.” This William Taylor died in 1789.

Hutchinson singled out another member of this grand jury as influential: “Mr Sam Austin of Boston.” Samuel Austin was a merchant and active Whig, playing a prominent role in the march on Hutchinson’s home earlier in 1770. In 1773 Austin was elected one of Boston’s selectmen, a position he held until the end of the siege.

One of Samuel Austin’s sons was Jonathan Williams Austin, who graduated from Harvard in 1769 and started clerking for John Adams that August. The younger Austin was also a witness at the Massacre trials, identifying Pvt. William Macauley.

In their deliberations, the grand jury led by Col. Taylor decided to believe the young French servant Charles Bourgate and the people who testified to seeing flashes from the Customs House windows. They therefore rejected the testimony of the men Bourgate accused. According to an anonymous Crown informant:

Notwithstanding [John] Munro & [Edward] Manwarring proveing a perfect Alibi they were this day (27th March) committed to Jail, as was also Green’s son and Thomas the manservant—the Grand Jury haveing found bills against them, as seven people positively swore to guns being fired that night out of the Custom House Windows.

Thus, 250 years ago today, the response of the grand jury to hearing Hammond Green, Thomas Greenwood, and others testify that there was no conspiracy to shoot people from the Customs House was to indict those men as being part of the conspiracy.

TOMORROW: The real villain—or the real target?

“Richard Fry, Stationer, Bookseller, Paper-maker, and Rag Merchant”

In September 1728 the Massachusetts General Court promoted local paper manufacturing by granting a ten-year patent to a group of investors that included Daniel Henchman, Benjamin Faneuil, and Thomas Hancock. Those partners built a mill in Milton and delivered the first sample of paper back to the legislature three years later.

Another Boston merchant, Samuel Waldo (1696-1759, shown here) also saw potential in paper. He made a partnership with Thomas Westbrook (1675–1744) of the district of Maine, securing title to a large swath of land between the Penobscot and Muscongus Rivers. Waldo headed to Britain to recruit skilled craftsmen while Westbrook set about building a settlement to receive them.

One of the men Waldo met in England was Richard Fry. According to A. H. Shorter’s Paper Making in the British Isles (1971), Fry, a “rag merchant,” paid to insure a paper mill at Long Wick in Buckinghamshire in 1726. John Bidwell’s American Paper Mills (2013) adds that Fry oversaw two more paper mills in Berkshire and owned part of a paper warehouse in London. Bidwell also reported that in 1730 Fry went bankrupt, and thus at liberty to make a new start in America.

Fry and Waldo signed an indenture contract in 1731. Fry promised to move to New England, and Waldo promised that within ten months Westbrook would finish building a paper mill on their land in Maine for Fry to run.

Richard Fry reached Boston by the end of that year. He had to support himself for a while, so in April and May 1732 he ran the same advertisement in the New-England Weekly Journal, Weekly Rehearsal, and Boston Gazette:

This is to give Notice, That Richard Fry, Stationer, Bookseller, Paper-maker, and Rag Merchant, from the City of London, keeps at Mr. Thomas Fleet’s Printer at the Heart & Crown in Cornhill, Boston; Where the said Fry is ready to accommodate all Gentlemen, Merchants, and Tradesmen, with sets of Accompt Books, after the neatest manner: And whereas, it has been the common Method of the most curious merchants in Boston, to Procure their Books from London, This is to acquaint those Gentlemen, that I the said Fry, will sell all sorts of Accompt-Books, done after the most acurate manner, for 20 per Cent. Cheaper than they can have them from London.

I return the Publick Thanks for following the Directions of my former Advertisement for gathering of Rags, and hope they will continue the like Method; having received seven thousand weight & upwards already.

For the pleasing entertainment of the Polite part of Mankind, I have Printed the most Beautiful Poems of Mr. Stephen Duck, the famous Wiltshire Poet: It is a full demonstration to me that the People of New England, have a fine taste for Good Sense & Polite Learning, having already Sold 1200 of these Poems.

I haven’t found any “former Advertisement.” If Fry had indeed collected 7,000 pounds of rags and sold 1,200 copies of the Duck poetry collection, most of that work might have been in Britain. The Boston print shop of Kneeland and Green did issue Duck’s Poems on Several Subjects in 1732, but it’s not clear whether they were working with Fry or inspired by him.

On 29 May, Fry announced another scheme in the New-England Weekly Journal:

This is to Acquaint the Publick, that I have Printed a Specimen of a new Sett of Letters, lately Imported from London, on which I propose to print the Spectators by Subscription, at Three Pounds the Sett, neatly Bound; and that the Publick may be intirely satisfied, the Subscriptions in Boston are to be taken in at the Office of Mr. Joseph Marion, Notary Publick, & Deposited in his hands.

It will be needless to acquaint the Learned and Polite part, that nothing more demonstrates the fine Genius of a Country, than to have the curious Art of Printing brought to Perfection, wherein the present Age have Opportunity to convey their Ideas in fine Characters to succeeding Ages. The vast Returns the Dutch make only in this Branch of Trade is most prodigious, for they Print for all the Known parts of the World; and it was really the Grand Oppressions they suffer’d that gave them that Keen Edge, to such a pitch of Industry, as hath brought them to make that glorious Figure they now make in the World: Therefore the Rod is sometimes very Convenient to reform Common-wealths of those things which would certainly be destructive of their Happiness: and there is no way of bringing any Common-wealth out of any Calamity but Industry, and jointly to promote every Art and Science that has the least view of being useful to the Publick: Therefore I don't doubt but every Gentleman that is a true Lover of his Country will Subscribe.

And I justly flatter my self I shall have a Number of Ladies Subscribers, the Authors of these Books having always been justly esteem'd among them.

Richard Fry.

N.B. Subscriptions will be taken in at Newport, New-York, Philadelphia, Piscataqua, and South-Carolina, and after Three Hundred Subscriptions, the work to be committed to the Press, and finish’d with all possible Expedition. 20 s. to be paid at Subscribing, & 40 s. at Delivery.

Unaccountably, Fry’s type sample and hortatory advertisement didn’t bring in three hundred subscriptions, and he never printed the Spectator.

Meanwhile, Westbrook was still building up in Maine. The paper mill wasn’t finished within ten months. In fact, the building wasn’t ready for Fry to move in until 1734. He then signed a twenty-one-year lease, promising Waldo and Westbrook £64 sterling each year.

TOMORROW: The Brazen Head connection.

Thomas Nichols of Natick

On Monday I quoted a Connecticut newspaper report of the arrest of “one Thomas Nichols, a Molatto,” in Natick on suspicion of planning an uprising of enslaved people.

What do we know about Nichols? He appears in the Natick vital records on 17 Dec 1766, listed as a “transient.” He married “Patiance Ferrit” of that town, which was originally a community of “praying Indians” but was in transition to become yet another English-dominated farm town.

Patience Ferrit had been born in Milton in 1743. In Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-century Eastern Massachusetts, Daniel R. Mandell noted how her father Caesar Ferrit moved to Natick from Boston in 1751 “to live among his own Nation the aboriginal natives.” He brought his wife Naomi and four children born in Milton. The couple had three more children in Natick, as George Quintal detailed in Patriots of Color.

According to local chroniclers, Caesar Ferrit later claimed that only one of his grandparents was a Native American. The others were Dutch, French, and African. Ferrit said he himself was born in the Caribbean.

What’s more, Naomi Ferrit was of English extraction. She appears to be the Naomi Isaac who married “Cesar Ferre” in Dorchester in 1738, one of only a handful of marriages performed by a justice of the peace instead of a minister. There was even a local tradition that Naomi was the ward of “a wealthy gentleman in Boston” who employed Caesar Ferrit as a coachman. The young couple had fallen in love, this tale goes, and were forced to choose a poor life in Natick.

All those stories, some of which may even be true, testify to how the racial or ethnic categories that the laws set up were actually overlapping and fluid. The Native part of Natick was a refuge for families that crossed the society’s “color lines.” Did the Ferrits need to have ancestral roots in the Native nations of New England to live there?

By marrying Patience Ferrit, Thomas Nichols became part of that community. The couple had at least three children in Natick:

• Isaac, born 1 June 1768
• Ama, born 14 May 1770
• Cherrity, born 23 July 1773

When their third child was on the way, the couple petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to be allowed to sell real estate. They needed permission to do so because Patience Nichols was listed as a Native American. On 19 Jan 1773 the legislative Acts and Resolves state:

A Petition of Thomas Nichols of Natick a free negro man Setting forth That he hath lately purchased a plantation in Natick, containing near eighty acres of Land with a dwelling house thereon and many good accommodations; that he has lately intermarried with one Patience Terry an Indian, native, of said Natick who had legally heretofore purchased the following tracts of Land, situate in said Natick, which Lands the Petitioner paid for, but the Deed was given in his Wifes name vizt. the first lot containing about forty acres, the second lot about eleven acres more or less, the third thirty five and the fourth lot between seventy and eighty acres; of which last mentioned tract the Petitioner claims only one sixth part That he is considerably in debt for the purchase of his plantation aforesaid and otherwise. And praying that he may be impowered to sell the four pieces of Land aforesaid, which lie scattering to enable him to pay his just debts and to purchase some Stock and Tools for his plantation aforesaid.

The legislature granted the couple permission to make that sale.

Thomas Nichols had thus gone from a “transient” new arrival in Natick to a property-owner, though his economic situation apparently remained precarious. And a little more than two years later he was locked up, accused of fomenting unrest.

TOMORROW: What was the evidence for those suspicions?

“It was rumord about my turn would be next”

Yesterday I quoted Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s account of the anti-Stamp demonstration and riot on 14 Aug 1765. The next day, Andrew Oliver (Hutchinson’s brother-in-law) put out word that he was resigning as stamp master, though he made no public statement himself.

But that didn’t quiet the mob, as Hutchinson found out:

Towards the evening of the same day it was rumord about my turn would be next. Several of my friends were in pain & advised me to quit my house [shown here]. I sent my daughters [Sally (1744-1780) and Peggy (1754-1777)] & young son [Billy (1752-1780)] to lodge abroad & secured my doors & windows in the best manner I could.

About 9 sevral 100 came to the back part of my house & finding all fast the leader asked whether they should begin with the coach house or stables, but first attempting the gates they soon forced them & came up to the doors which finding well secured they moved round the body of them to the front of the house in another street & with furious knocks at the door demand entrance promising to do no damage they only wanted to speak to me or if I would come & declare to them I had never wrote to Engd. in favor of the stamp act they would not hurt a hair of my head. They could obtain no answer & some began to break the windows.

My neighbours were in distress for me one of them called out of his window & declared he knew I was not in town, at length one grave elderly tradesman went into the midst of them & seeing one of the mob lay hold of the pales asked what he was going to do

he replied to pull down the fence

he asked whether I had ever injured him & then begged them to be silent & being a noted speaker in town meetings he soon engaged their attention; he challenged every one of them to say I had ever done them the least wrong charged them with ingratitude in insulting a gentleman who had been serving his country all his days.

Their speaker acknowledged they had a regard for me in my private character but it was said I was in favor of the stamp act they knew I would not lye & if they could know from my own mouth that I was not they would be easy.

He replied he would answer for me. I was in favor of no act that would hurt the country but yet it was unreasonable in them to expect, if I was at home that I should be accountable to them & went on with his harangue until he brought them to give the word to move.

I was not a little pleased at the raising the siege which lasted near an hour for if I had been obliged to answer their questions I must either have enraged them or else given them a handle to justify their extravagant behaviour.

The next day Hutchinson took his children out to his country house in Milton.

In another letter written on 20 August, after he returned to Boston, Hutchinson gave a shorter version of the same event and said:

I live in the midst of neighbours who are friendly & some of them ventured into the midst of the mob & expostulated with them so that I escaped with the loss of a little glass. They had a notion that I had wrote to England in favor of the Stamp act; if I would declare I had not they would believe me but I did not like to be accountable to them.

Events might have turned out quite differently if the lieutenant governor had deigned to tell the crowd that he’d told his contacts in London that the Stamp Act was a bad idea. After all, he had. But he couldn’t bring himself to answer to popular demands like that. And the next time a crowd came to his house, they wouldn’t be dissuaded.