Mrs. Nathaniel Balch and Family

On 15 July 1758, the young lawyer Robert Treat Paine referred in his diary to Molly Fletcher. On other pages around that time he wrote about Mary, Molly, Miss Fletcher, and “Miss Molly.” He was quite interested.

The editors of Paine’s papers have guessed that he also addressed letters to Mary Fletcher of Boston using the playful pseudonym “Lavinia,” as in this letter from January 1757. The young Paine liked to compose long, detailed metaphors in his letters.

Mary Fletcher was born in 1730, a year before Paine. Her father was a ship’s captain, William Fletcher. When Mary was fifteen, Capt. Fletcher sailed his Boston Packet brigantine northeast as part of the colony’s expedition against Louisburg. In August 1745 he helped to capture a French ship carrying £300,000 in gold and silver, part of a very successful war.

Robert Treat Paine’s last surviving letter to “Lavinia” was in 1760. Three years later, Mary Fletcher married the hatter Nathaniel Balch. She was thirty-three years old and he was twenty-eight. At the time he was establishing his business in Providence, Rhode Island. Their first baby was born there exactly nine months later. In 1765 the family moved back to Boston, where both parents grew up. They had four more children before the new war began.

The first two of those children were boys, Nathaniel, Jr., and William. Both joined the U.S. Army as junior officers after the Revolutionary War, and William died in the Battle of the Wabash or “St. Clair’s Defeat.” Nathaniel mustered out safely and succeeded his father in the hat trade.

In December 1789 the Rev. Samuel Stillman (shown above) presided over a double wedding of his children Mary and Benjamin to Nathaniel Balch, Jr., and his sister Mary. (Mary Balch thus became Mary Stillman, and Mary Stillman became Mary Balch.) During the Quasi-War of 1798, Nathaniel, Jr., received a federal military commission as captain and started to recruit a company, but there was no fighting.

Mary (Fletcher) Balch died in 1797, aged sixty-seven. The 10 October Massachusetts Mercury carried this eulogy:

In her character were combined all that sincerity candor and benevolence, which form the basis of solid friendship; in her social relations she was attentive, kind and affectionate; her friends, however painful the event, have the consolatory reflection, that her release from a destressing existence below, has introduced her to a state of happiness beyond the grave, lasting as her spiritual nature, and ample in its powers of reception.

Her widowed husband lived another eleven years, serving on the Boston board of health, as a trustee of the Humane Society, and even once as a Federalist candidate for the legislature. At the end of September 1808, the New-England Palladium published this notice:

A correspondent has favored us with the following Obituary Notice of the late NATHANIEL BALCH, Esquire, who died the 18th inst. [i.e., of this month] aged 73.

“As a husband, parent and friend, and in the various walks of domestic life, his conduct was exemplary.—He was also a very useful citizen, industrious and liberal, a lover of order and his country’s constitution.—Possessed of an uncommon share of wit and humour, tempered with discretion and improved by good sense, his company was courted by his contemporaries of the first ranks in society.—And, though in younger life he contributed much to social enjoyment, yet he neglected not his more essential avocations; for he was truly a man of business.––In riper years he declared his Christian Faith, and sanctioned it by charitable deeds.—Many are the mourners who feel his loss, and bless his memory.”

The author of those lines was Robert Treat Paine.

Legends of Nathaniel Balch

As I discussed back here, the hatter Nathaniel Balch was well known in post-Revolutionary Boston for his sense of humor and his friendship with Gov. John Hancock.

The Genealogy of the Balch Families in America (1897) shared a family tradition about one of the jokes that Hancock and Balch shared:

Governor Hancock one day said to Balch, ”Come up and see a Savage I have locked in my garret.”

He complied, and found that the Governor was protecting a portrait painter named Savage from arrest for debt. Savage was engaged on a portrait of the Governor, and at the request of Hancock, also made one of Balch.

Edward Savage (1761-1817) was a native of Princeton, Massachusetts. He trained as a goldsmith but by the late 1780s was making copies of Copleys and evidently learning a lot from them. Around 1788 Savage painted a full-length portrait of John and Dorothy Hancock, which I believe is now at the Katzen Art Center of American University. I don’t have any evidence to confirm that Savage was hiding out from creditors at the time.

Savage’s smaller portrait of the hatter, labeled on the back “painted by the artist Savage by order of Governor Hancock of Massachusetts,” descended in the Balch family into this century.

In 1840 the writer E. S. Thomas recalled about Gov. Hancock, “such was the mutual attachment between the governor and Mr. Balch, that if the former was called away, no matter what distance, ’Squire Balch attended him, like his shadow.”

In fact, Balch’s entertaining personality could overshadow the governor. This item in the 31 July 1792 Argus became a little famous for joking about that:

TOMORROW: Mrs. Balch and Mr. Paine.

When Balch Came Back

In early October 1775, Nathaniel Balch the hatter left London and sailed back home to America.

On 23 December, the Providence Gazette reported on news from the preceding days:

Captain Gorham is arrived at Nantucket from London, after a Passage of eleven Weeks. With him came passenger Mr. NATHANIEL BALCH, late of Boston.  

Balch was soon on the mainland. On 20 December, the Boston court official and insurance broker Ezekiel Price, taking refuge from the siege in Stoughton, wrote in his diary:

Mr. Bailies, from Taunton, says that Mr. Nathaniel Balch was there last night. He is lately from London, and reports that the great men in England are against us, but that the common people are in our favor.

However, four days later Price wrote that young Benjamin Hichborn had told him:

Mr. Balch says our Boston gentry that lately went to England were, most of them, very desirous of getting back; that the people there in general were against us, and continually threatening to scourge us till they had obliged us to submit.

I don’t trust Hitchborn about anything. But the discrepancy between Price’s entries may simply be due to him using the word “people” to refer to two different groups: ordinary people as opposed to “great men” in his first entry, British gentry as opposed to Loyalist gentry in the second.

Finally, there’s a mention from Isaac Smith, Sr., father of one of the men Balch had sailed and seen some sights in London with. Smith wrote to his niece’s husband, John Adams, on 2 Jan 1776:

Itts likely you may have heard Mr. Balch is returnd from England but came Out the begining Octbr. so cant bring any thing New of a publick Nature tho possibly he may of his One invention.

Balch’s own invention might have meant private information he’d picked up, though, knowing him, it might just as well have been some new funny stories. I haven’t come across any other references to Massachusetts men debriefing the hatter about his trip.

Which means I still have the mystery of why Balch went to Britain at all.

TOMORROW: Post-war legends.

Seeing London with Nathaniel Balch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TOMORROW: Home again.

The Voyage of Nathaniel Balch

Earlier this year I introduced the figure of Nathaniel Balch, a hatter who was prominent in Boston society before and after the Revolutionary War.

Balch was close to Revolutionary leaders, particularly John Hancock. In August 1769, Balch entertained at the Sons of Liberty banquet. So I assume he was a Whig.

When the war broke out in April 1775, Balch was inside Boston. Many people who opposed the royal government spent the next few weeks working to get out to the countryside, a safe distance behind the provincial lines. Balch had other plans.

On 6 May, merchant John Andrews wrote to his relative William Barrell:

Your uncle Joe has engag’d a passage for London, at the expence of one hundred Guineas for himself and wife, to expedite her sailing without waiting for freight. Balch, brother Joe and his wife, Jno. Amory, &ca., &ca., go in her. . . . You must know, that no person who leaves the town is allow’d to return again.

That same day the young merchant David Greene sent the same news to a relative in Demerara:

I am going to London with Captain Callahan, and expect to have for fellow-passengers Mr. J[oseph]. Green and wife, of School Street; Mr. J. Barrell and lady, Mr. John Amory and lady, Mrs. Callahan, Mr. Balch, Mr. S[amuel]. Quincey, D[avid]. Sears, &c. As I have long entertained thoughts of making this voyage, as it will be impossible to do any business here, and as I may find something to do in England, I doubt not you will approve of my intention.

John Callahan sailed regularly between Boston and London in the 1770s. His name often appeared in the newspapers attached to the latest news or goods from London. When Gov. Thomas Hutchinson left Massachusetts in the spring of 1774, he traveled on Capt. Callahan’s Minerva.

The 22 May 1862 Boston Evening Transcript offered more information, tagged to Viscount Lyndhurst, the eminent British attorney who had been born in Boston as the oldest son of John Singleton and Susanna Copley:

If it is of sufficient importance to know the exact time that Lord Lyndhurst left this country for England, allow me to state that he was a passenger on board the ship Minerva, Capt. Callahan, which sailed from Marblehead May 27, 1775, with fourteen other cabin passengers; thirty-nine souls in all on board.

The cabin passengers were Mrs. Callahan, Joseph Green, Esq., and lady, Mr. John Amory and lady, Mrs. Copley and three children, Mrs. Jackson, Samuel Quincy, Esq., Lieut. Wm. Aug. Merrick, of the Royal Navy, Mr. David Green, Mr. David Sears, Mr. Nath. Balch, Mr. Isaac Smith, Jr., besides servants, and six steerage passengers.

The above is from the diary of a fellow passenger, who landed at Dover 24th June, and arrived in London 6 P. M. next day. Lord Lyndhurst was born 21st May, 1772—of course, was just 3 years and six days old.

E.

At first I doubted that the Minerva really sailed from Marblehead, thinking that was a legal fiction that the Customs service allowed because the port of Boston was still legally closed. But the 31 May Massachusetts Spy reported, “Captain Callahan is to sail this week for London from Salem.”

Balch, therefore, along with the many Loyalists in that party, got a pass to leave besieged Boston, crossed into territory held by the provincial army, and then got onto a ship to sail to Britain itself. He must really have wanted to go.

TOMORROW: Reasons for leaving.

Memories of “Mr. Balch’s Mimickry”

As I detailed yesterday, Nathaniel Balch (shown here, courtesy of Balchipedia) was a hatter. But at heart he was an entertainer, known across Boston for his humor and charm.

When Josiah Quincy, Jr., was traveling in the southern colonies on 6 Mar 1773, he wrote in his diary: “In walking with ——— occurred a singular event, of which Balch could make a humorous story.” Unfortunately, Quincy didn’t record that event and we don’t know what Balch made of it.

Most of our descriptions of Balch come from after independence, when he became known as a bosom friend of Gov. John Hancock. The French political reformer Jacques Pierre Brissot (1754-1793) wrote of an encounter in 1788: “Governor Hancock…has the virtues and the address of popularism; that is to say, that without effort he shews himself the equal and the friend of all. I supped at his house with a hatter, who appeared to be in great familiarity with him.”

The most lively pictures of Balch appear in the memoirs of men writing in the mid-1800s who had been boys growing up in Hancock’s Boston. E. S. Thomas wrote about Gov. Hancock in 1840:

He was very fond of joke and repartee, so much so, that a worthy citizen of Boston, Nathaniel Balch, Esq., a hatter, who never failed to appear among the invited guests at his hospitable board, obtained the unenvied appellation of “the Governor’s Jester.”

Sidney Willard wrote in 1855:

For his three-cornered hat, his cocked hat, my father resorted to Nathan Balch, a very worthy and respectable man, sometimes irreverently called Nat. Balch; a frequent guest of Governor Hancock, and entertainer of his other guests, adding zest to the viands and the vina at the dinner-board by anecdotes and stories, mimetric [sic] art, humor, witticism, and song, drawn from his inexhaustible storehouse.

And Samuel Breck’s posthumously published memoir said:

We had a medley of eccentric tradesmen in Boston in 1788, who were a compound of flat simplicity in manners and acute cleverness in conversation, shrewd, perhaps somewhat cunning; often witty; always smart and intelligent.

…above all, Balch, the hatter. His shop was the principal lounge even of the first people in the town. Governor Hancock, when the gout permitted, resorted to this grand rendezvous, and there exchanged jokes with Balch and his company, or, as sometimes happened, discussed grave political subjects, and, tout en badinant, settled leading principles of his administration.

So what material did Balch pull out for the Sons of Liberty dinner in August 1769, with more than three hundred of Boston’s leading gentlemen present?

According to John Adams:

After Dinner was over and the Toasts drank we were diverted with Mr. Balch’s Mimickry. He gave Us, the Lawyers Head, and the Hunting of a Bitch fox.

Hmm. I guess you had to be there.

TOMORROW: The party’s over.

Nathaniel Balch at the Sign of the Hat

The man who provided after-dinner, after-toasts entertainment for the big Sons of Liberty dinner on 14 Aug 1769 was Nathaniel Balch (1735-1808).

Balch was born into an old New England family in Boston, baptized at the New South Meetinghouse. In May 1760 he was admitted as a freeman in Rhode Island, living in Providence. An advertisement in the 15 Oct 1763 Providence Gazette called him “Capt. Nathaniel Balch” and said he was established at “the Sign of the Hat.”

Balch didn’t sell just hats, though. On 7 Jan 1764 he offered “enamell’d Stone Ware”; glassware; pipes “by the Box, Gross, or Dozen”; snuff; pepper and other spices; cheese; and “the very best Hyson Tea,” all “as cheap as they can be purchased in Boston.”

Not to mention “Choice new Philadelphia Flour,” chocolate, brown sugar, “Melasses,” rum, shoes from Lynn, and tickets to lotteries authorized by both Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Along with, of course, “FELT and CASTOR HATS.”

According to Dr. Galusha B. Balch’s Genealogy of the Balch Families in America (1897), Nathaniel married Mary Fletcher, a distant cousin, on 26 May 1763. Their oldest child, Nathaniel, Jr., was born in Providence on 26 Feb 1764. (This genealogy contradicts itself by stating elsewhere that all of Nathaniel and Mary’s children were born in Boston.)

The Balches lived in a “Two-Story Dwelling-House…at the North End of the Town…fronting two Streets.” Balch wrote: “It has an excellent Cellar, two commodious Shops, with a small Garden adjoining, whereon stands a large Store, Stable, Wood-House, and Chaise-House.” Of course, he was trying to sell the property at the time.

In May 1764, Balch began to advertise for customers to settle their balances with him. In January 1765 he put his house on the market, and in May he announced that “he purposes to leave the Colony in a few Days.” The Balches returned to Boston in time for the birth of their second son, William, on 11 July 1765.

Back in his home town, Balch first worked out of “Mr. Bligh’s Shop in Marlborough Street” before moving to “Mr. John Langdon’s in Fore Street, near the Draw-Bridge” over the creek that separated the North End from the central district. On 14 July 1766 he advertised:

The best, Beaver, Beaveret, Castor and Felt Hats, of his own make.

Also a compleat Assortment of Glass, China and Delph Ware, French Indigo, Flask Oyl, Spices of all sorts, Allum, Copperas, Mustard, Poland Starch, Stone blue, House Brushes, Salt Petre, Isinglass, Kippen’s Snuff, Jappan’d Ware, Mahogany Trays and Tea Chests, Sugar Canisters, Baskets for China, Knives and Bread, Knives and Forks, Shoe Buckles, Candlesticks, Snuff Boxes, Pipes, Figs, Currants, best Hyson and Bohea Tea, Coffee and Chocolate, Loaf and Brown Sugar, and many other Articles all Cheap for Cash.——

The March 1767 Boston town meeting elected Nathaniel Balch a Clerk of the Market, a beginning-level town office that showed he had the respect of his neighbors. He didn’t seek higher office at this time, though.

At the end of 1770 Balch moved from Fort Street to Cornhill, right in the center of town. From that point until 1774 his advertisements were all about hats:

Best Beaver and Beaveritt Hatts,
of his own make, cock’d in the newest Taste, genteel white riding Hatts for Ladies and Gentlemen, Children’s round turn-up Hatts or Whimseys, both black and white of all Prices, Felt Hatts of all Sorts. Also, an Assortment of Hatters Trimmings.

Balch’s ads appeared in the Boston News-Letter, the newspaper that supported the royal government but also had the most genteel readership. He was clearly establishing himself.

But I don’t think Balch’s heart was really in hatmaking.

TOMORROW: A natural entertainer.

Farewell to Two Historical Gentlemen

The community of historical interpreters in Massachusetts is mourning two gentlemen who died this week.

Among other personas, Thomas Macy portrayed John Adams at many venues, often performing a two-person epistolary play with Patricia Bridgman as Abigail. For years Tom wanted to bring that Adams portrayal to Washington’s Headquarters, and as part of last month’s reenactment he was able to portray Adams’s meeting with Gen. George Washington.

Tom also wrote a short book called The Hannah and the Nautilus: The Beginning of the American Revolution at Sea, published by the Beverly Historical Society in 2002. It’s a detailed study of one of the first naval skirmishes of the Revolutionary War, which took place off Beverly’s coast in September 1775.

In Boston, Bob Jolly was one of the Freedom Trail Players for several years. He was a pioneer in portraying a little-known citizen of Revolutionary Boston rather than a celebrated name, an approach that allows visitors to consider events through the eyes of an ordinary person.

Bob’s character was Nathaniel Balch, a handsome hatter who was a close friend of Gov. John Hancock. Balch seems to have had the personality of a nightclub comic, making him a good match for Bob, who was also an actor and performer of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas.

Tom came from Nantucket, Bob from Louisiana, but both found new homes and new friends in the world of local historical interpretation.