“Coffin then took to ‘posting’ Campbell in public places”

I recommend Todd Braisted’s article “Damn’d Good Shots: A Matter of Honor on the Streets of New York, 1783,” shared on the Gotham Center website.

One of the central figures in this story is John Coffin, born in Boston around 1751. His father, Nathaniel Coffin, held a high rank in the local Customs office, and other members of the family were merchants. They were also Anglicans, giving them two reasons to support the Crown.

Coffin is said to have fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill, but exactly how is unclear. The record shows him joining a Loyalist regiment in January 1777. Braisted picks up the story:

The New Englander started his military career somewhat oddly in a regiment raised in the Hudson Valley, Lt. Col. John Bayard’s King’s Orange Rangers.

After a series of run-ins with a fellow officer, Lt. John Cummings, Coffin found he could no longer stay, at least comfortably, in the Rangers. In July 1778 he exchanged units with Captain John Howard, an officer in similar circumstances in his own corps, thereafter serving in the New York Volunteers. The New York Volunteers, one of the first Provincial units raised in the war, would serve with distinction for the following four years in the south.

Coffin, at the head of the regiment’s light infantry company, fought at the taking and defense of Savannah, Brier Creek, Purysburg, Siege of Charleston, Rocky Mount, Hobkirk’s Hill, Eutaw Springs and numerous other skirmishes. . . .

While with his new corps in Charleston and later back in New York after the British evacuated the south, Coffin had many conversations and observations concerning Lt. [George] Col. Campbell’s conduct as a commanding officer. . . .

Virtually every one of the officers under his command stepped forward and detailed the tension in the regiment and the terrible fatigues it had undergone, and how Lt. Col. Campbell had contributed negatively to everything. The court agreed. They found him guilty of falsely accusing Captain [Abraham] DePeyster, not accounting for large sums of the regiment’s money and acting in a tyrannical and oppressive manner. For all of these, he was sentenced to be suspended without pay for six months.

But the tension was not over. Major Coffin had not served long in the regiment, but what he had seen and experienced led him to an instant dislike of Campbell. After the sentence of the court a “fracas” occurred in the street between the two officers, which led to a serious verbal exchange. Coffin then took to “posting” Campbell in public places; that is to say, he wrote extremely inflammatory pieces about him and put them up in public places to draw Campbell into a duel, or send him away in disgrace.

Read the article to learn what happened next, who got seriously hurt, and what happened after that.

“Thus ended the Superior Court”

As I described yesterday, when the Massachusetts Superior Court tried to open a new session in Boston on Tuesday, 30 Aug 1774, all the men chosen for juries refused to serve under Chief Justice Peter Oliver.

John Adams was away at the First Continental Congress, so his former clerk William Tudor described the judges’ response for him: “The Court told them they should consider of their Refusal, and then adjourn’d to next Day.”

The jurors didn’t change their minds. On the morning of 31 August the court sat again. Oliver and associate justices Foster Hutchinson and William Browne were at the Province House, meeting with Gen. Thomas Gage as part of his appointed Council. That body advised the governor to keep his redcoats in Boston and not “send any Troops into the interior parts of the Province.”

Tudor wrote that the justices who remained on the bench

…continued all the continued Actions till next Term. They agreed to let us file Complaints and to enter up Judgement on them; which we had imagined they would not consent to, as some of the Judges the first Day had said that if the County would rise and prevent them doing Business generally, they should decline finishing it partially, and the County must thank themselves for the Inconveniences of their own Madness.

The next day:

One small Point was argued by Mr. J[osiah]. Q[uincy]. and [Samuel] Fitch, a few Complaints read, and after Mr. Fitch, in Complyance with a previous Vote of the Bar, had reccommended four of Us to be admitted to the Atty.’s Oath, the Court adjourn’d to next Day.

Tudor was among the young men hoping to be admitted to the Boston bar at this session.

On the morning of Friday, 2 September, “there were a Number of printed Bills stuck up at the Court house and other Parts of the Town, threatening certain Death to any and all the Bar who should presume to attend the Superior Court then sitting.” Someone with access to a print shop had produced those death threats, making them all the more ominous.

The justices postponed “All the new enter’d Actions” as well as the old ones. Then the jurists noticed that people were taking advantage of the lack of juries to enter appeals, thus postponing judgments against them. Tudor wrote to Adams at length on whether this tactic was valid. “You had but one [case] in this Predicament,” he added.

The court swore in one new attorney: Nathaniel Coffin, Jr., a professed Loyalist. The other three young men hung back. Finally, the justices adjourned. “Thus ended the Superior Court and is the last common Law Court that will be allowed to sit in this or any other County of the Province,” Tudor wrote.

That same day, thousands of rural militiamen gathered in Cambridge in what was later dubbed the “Powder Alarm.” People inside Boston worried about an armed invasion. By evening, it was clear that the rest of the province was no longer going to cooperate with the royal authorities at all.

William Molineux’s refusal to serve as a juror under Chief Justice Oliver in the summer of 1773 had grown into the legislature’s march to impeaching Oliver, crowds closing the courthouses in rural counties, Suffolk County citizens boycotting juries, and finally a halt to all Superior Court business. Colonial Massachusetts’s judicial system was frozen, and in some areas would stay jammed up until past the Shays Rebellion in the late 1780s.

“The house of a Tory, named Coffin”

As I quoted yesterday, in 1835 George R. T. Hewes told a story about Adm. John Montagu scolding the Bostonians who had just destroyed the East India Company’s tea and Lendell Pitts answering him.

That exchange took place, Hewes said, “at the house of a Tory, named Coffin, who lived at the head of the wharf.”

Montagu did have a connection with a Loyalist named Coffin. Nathaniel Coffin (1725–1780) was the cashier and receiver general in the Boston Customs Office.

Nathaniel’s son Isaac (1759–1839) joined the Royal Navy in 1772, and both the Naval Chronicle and Gentleman’s Magazine stated that Montagu sponsored the teenager’s commission. (Isaac Coffin went on to become an admiral himself.)

That said, Nathaniel Coffin’s house wasn’t at the head of Griffin’s Wharf. It was on the corner of Essex Street and modern Harrison Avenue. Though that estate was waterfront property, it didn’t abut Griffin’s Wharf.

We also have the evidence of Adm. Montagu’s report to his superiors in London, written on 17 Dec 1773. In that document, he said nothing about being in town to witness the destruction of the tea. It’s plausible that if he had been that close, the admiral wouldn’t have included that detail lest it raise questions about why he didn’t use his personal authority to stop the rioters.

But that scenario wouldn’t square with what Montagu did write in that report:

During the whole of this transaction neither the governor, magistrates, owner, nor the revenue officers of this place, ever called for my assistance. If they had, I could easily have prevented the execution of this plan, but must have endangered the lives of many innocent people by firing upon the town.

That sounds like Montagu was on his flagship, fully armed with cannon crew and marines who could shoot at the men on Griffin’s Wharf—at the risk of hitting the hundreds of other people watching them.

But if Montagu had been waiting for a request from the “governor, magistrates, [or] revenue officers” to use such force against the rioters, the last place he would have been would be in a house right beside that location and thus in firing range himself.

TOMORROW: And yet…

Two Wheatley Biographies, Compared and Contrasted

The Los Angeles Review of Books just ran Hollis Robbins’s assessment of what the headline calls “Two New Books About Phillis Wheatley.”

One of those books is David Waldstreicher’s The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, published earlier this year. The other is the new edition of Vincent Carretta’s biography, originally titled Phillis Wheatley in 2011 and now revised and expanded as Phillis Wheatley Peters.

By some measures Carretta’s book wouldn’t count as new, though it certainly has new material. Its inclusion in this review not simply as a foil for Waldstreicher’s book but in sharing the spotlight seems to reflect how Robbins, dean of humanities at the University of Utah, prefers Carretta’s approach:

Getting to know Wheatley via Carretta means being immersed in the material facts of life of one portion of the globe between the years 1750 and 1800: colonial America, the slave trade, shipping lanes and trade between Europe and the colonies, merchant and church life in Boston, what books were available, who read what, and what political revolutions were brewing. . . .

Getting to know Wheatley via Waldstreicher is far easier—his book brings Wheatley to the present and to present-day readers, presuming that she would think and speak as we think and speak. . . . He offers a Phillis Wheatley ready for her TikTok close-up.

As examples of the different approaches, Robbins presents passages showing how the two books discuss the same subjects. One of those is the poem “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” which I discussed last month.

Here are extracts from that contrast:

When, nearly 70 pages in, Carretta’s readers finally get to Wheatley’s first published poem, “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” (1767), about a schooner laden with whale oil that survived the most terrible gale in memory, sufficient details about the key players (Nathaniel Coffin was an Anglican Boston merchant and an enslaver of a young girl named Sappho while Hussey was one of several sons of a prominent and prosperous Nantucket Quaker merchant and owner of whaling vessels) have been offered to support Carretta’s claim that “Phillis was already commenting on transatlantic economic and political subjects by the time she was about fifteen years old.” . . .

Waldstreicher opens his book with this very poem, to begin his argument that Wheatley’s poetic expressions must be a matter of what she personally experienced and felt. . . . [W]hile it is not at all wrong to wonder whether the trauma of the poet’s Middle Passage sparked her drive to write so forcefully and so well, it is a question, not a certainty. . . . But Waldstreicher’s readers don’t really have a choice to agree or not with his conjectures and conclusions that “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” was more about Wheatley than about Hussey and Coffin. Waldstreicher does not mention that Coffin was an enslaver in talking about the poem. An endnote disputes Carretta’s claim, saying that “there were many Coffins and Husseys” in the area. But shouldn’t readers be told it is a possibility?

Later in the review Robbins brings in a third author, of sorts. She asked ChatGPT’s GPT-4 “what might modern readers assume Phillis Wheatley was thinking when she wrote ‘On Messrs. Huffey and Coffin’ in 1767.” This appears to be a way to saying that even a machine can make assumptions about Phillis Wheatley’s thoughts and feelings, with the tacit implication that Waldstreicher’s book may do that in a more convincing (and better written) way but Carretta’s “careful archival research and scrupulous historical accuracy” is more valuable.

Now as I read Waldstreicher’s endnotes about that early poem, he identifies Coffin not as Nathaniel Coffin of Boston but as Richard Coffin of Nantucket—and I found that identification convincing. Did Richard Coffin enslave people? I don’t know. He’s not as well documented as the rich merchant from Boston, but there’s no evidence that merchant was in danger of drowning in September 1767.

Carretta’s connection between “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” and slaveholding thus seems more strained than Waldstreicher’s linkage of maritime danger and the teen-aged Phillis’s memory of her own Atlantic crossing. And that assessment is based on researching the historical context of the event, which is indeed Carretta’s strong point but which Waldstreicher has managed as well.

A Coffin at Bunker Hill

Nathaniel Coffin (1725-80) was a merchant in Boston who in November 1768 took the job of Deputy Cashier to the American Board of Customs.

That shifted Coffin politically onto the side of the royal government. He would even report to his employers about Boston town meetings and private conversations with Whig leaders, but he never hid his distaste for protest and thus wasn’t really undercover.

With Coffin came his sons, John (1756-1838) and Isaac (1759-1839). They both joined the British military during the Revolutionary War and had long and distinguished careers. John became a general, judge, and legislator in New Brunswick. Isaac became an admiral, baronet, and Member of Parliament in England. Since this branch of the Coffin family still had relatives back in Massachusetts, they corresponded and visited with people in the U.S. of A. between and after the wars.

At the start of the war, it appears, John Coffin was a teenager helping to sail a troop transport ship. On 9 Jan 1819, Josiah Quincy (after he served in Congress but before he was elected mayor) recorded a story about Coffin in his diary:

In conversation with William Sullivan. He dined yesterday in company with General Coffin of the British army. Coffin said, that he had the command of the first boat (being then Lieutenant of a transport ship) which landed the advance of the first regiment of British grenadiers at the attack of Bunker’s Hill. As the boat touched the shore, a three-pound shot from the American lines passed lengthways over the boat, touched not a man, and beat out her stern.

Further service with his boat being thus rendered impracticable, Coffin took a musket, joined the assailants, and was in the midst of the battle. He said that he had been since that time in many engagements, but never knew one, for the time it lasted, so hot and destructive.

Quincy evidently wrote this down because “The anecdote proves what has been denied,—that artillery was used on the American side in the battle of Bunker’s Hill.” There’s ample evidence of such artillery from other sources, but American chroniclers had preferred to portray their side as total underdogs. In fact, the diary of Lt. Richard Williams tells us that the provincials were firing five-pound balls, even bigger than what Gen. Coffin described whizzing past him.

The biography of John Coffin published by his son in 1874 goes into more detail, though not necessarily more reliable detail. It said:

John…was sent to sea at a very early age, and served his time in a Boston Ship; being an active young man he soon rose in the estimation of his Captain: in due time became Chief-mate, and soon after was placed in command of the ship, at the early age of eighteen.

In 1774, Mr. John Coffin brought his ship to England; the following year the Government took her up amongst others for the conveyance of troops to America, where the war had commenced. He had on board nearly a whole Regiment with General Howse (in command of the troops), who was ordered out to supersede General [Thomas] Gage, at Boston.

We know Gen. William Howe actually arrived in Boston on 25 May 1775 aboard the Royal Navy ship Cerberus, along with Gen. John Burgoyne and Gen. Henry Clinton. Other ships and soldiers arrived around the middle of June, and Coffin may well have been working on one of those ships instead.

The vessel arrived at Boston, on the 15th of June, Mr. Coffin landed the Regiment immediately under Bunker’s Hill, and the action having already commenced (17th June, 1775), he was requested by the Colonel “to come up and see the fun;” the only weapon at hand being the tiller of his boat, he immediately (to use a nautical phrase) unshipped it, and with equal determination commenced laying about him, and shipped the powder and belt, and musket of the first man he knocked down, and bore an active part during the rest of the action.

This is even more dramatic than the anecdote Quincy recorded, but the only men who would have been within reach of Coffin’s tiller as he was really “laying about him” would have been British soldiers.

In consideration of his gallant conduct, he was presented to General Gage after the battle, and made an Ensign on the field; shortly after he was promoted to a Lieutenant, but still retained the command of his ship.

There’s no documentary support for any of that. John Coffin was commissioned as a captain in the Orange Rangers, a Loyalist corps, in 1777.