“My succeeding to the post he holds from the crown”

Almost three years after Nathaniel Rogers died suddenly, he was back in the news.

Rogers was the author of one of the “Hutchinson Letters” that Benjamin Franklin leaked to the Boston Whigs in the spring of 1773.

Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wrote only six of those letters. Another six came from his friends and political allies (four from Andrew Oliver, shown here, and one each from Charles Paxton and Robert Auchmuty), and the last from his nephew, Rogers.

Those letters were collected by Thomas Whately, a Member of Parliament interested in the administration of the American colonies. Many of the writers discussed the challenges of governing Massachusetts, with some hints or recommendations about changing its constitution.

In contrast, Rogers’s letter was all about wanting the job of provincial secretary. It reveals just how such appointments were negotiated in this period, with a lot of discussion about money and little about the public interest or policy.

Boston, Decem. 12th 1768.

My Dear Sir,

I wrote you a few days ago, and did not then think of troubling you upon any private affair of mine, at least not so suddenly; but within this day or two, I have had a conversation with Mr. [Andrew] Oliver, secretary of the province, the design of which was my succeeding to the post he holds from the crown, upon the idea, that provision would be made for governor [Francis] Bernard, and the lieutenant governor [i.e., Uncle Hutchinson] would succeed to the chair, then the secretary is desirous of being lieutenant governor, and if in any way, three hundred pounds a year could be annexed to the appointment.

You are sensible the appointment is in one department [i.e., the Colonial Office], and the grant of money in another [the Treasury, funded by Customs revenue under the Townshend Act]; now the present lieutenant governor has an assignment of £200 a year upon the customs here; he has not received any thing from it as yet, and is doubtful if he shall; he has no doubt of its lapse to the crown, if he has the chair; if then by any interest that sum could be assigned to Mr. Oliver as lieutenant governor, and if he should be allowed (as has been usual for all lieutenant governors) to hold the command of the castle, that would be another £100. This would compleat the secretary’s views; and he thinks his public services, the injuries he has received in that service, and the favorable sentiments entertained of him by government, may lead him to these views, and he hopes for the interest of his friends.

The place of secretary is worth £300 a year, but is a provincial grant at present, so that it will not allow to be quartered on: And as I had a view upon the place when I was in England, and went so far as to converse with several men of interest upon it, tho’ I never had an opportunity to mention it to you after I recovered my illness—I hope you will allow me your influence, and by extending it at the treasury, to facilitate the assignment of the £200 a year, it will be serving the secretary, and it will very much oblige me.——

The secretary is advanced in life, tho’ much more so in health, which has been much impaired by the injuries he received, and he wishes to quit the more active scenes; he considers this as a kind of otium cum dignitate, and from merits one may think he has a claim to it.

I will mention to you the gentlemen, who are acquainted with my views and whose favourable approbation I have had. Governor [Thomas] Pownall, Mr. John Pownall, and Dr. Franklin.—My lord Hillsborough is not unacquainted with it—I have since I have been here, wrote Mr. [Richard] Jackson upon the subject, and have by this vessel wrote Mr. [Israel] Mauduit.

I think my character stands fair—I have not been without application to public affairs, and have acquired some knowledge of our provincial affairs, and notwithstanding our many free conversations in England, I am considered here as on government side, for which I have been often traduced both publickly and privately, and very lately have had two or three slaps. The governor and lieutenant governor are fully acquainted with the negociation and I meet their approbation; all is upon the idea the governor is provided for, and there shall by any means be a vacancy of the lieut. governor’s place.

I have gone so far, as to say to some of my friends, that rather than not succeed I would agree to pay the secretary £100 a year out of the office to make up £300, provided he could obtain only the assignment of £200—but the other proposal would to be sure be most eligible.

I scarce know any apology to make for troubling you upon the subject; the friendship you shewed me in London, and the favourable expressions you made use of to the lieut. governor in my behalf encourage me, besides a sort of egotism, which inclines men to think what they wish to be real. I submit myself to the enquiries of any of my countrymen in England, but I should wish the matter may be secret ’till it is effected.

I am with very great respect and regard, my dear sir,

Your most obedient, and most humble servant,

NATH. ROGERS.

Rogers thus privately lobbied for annual payments to Oliver as lieutenant governor that would be equal to the secretary’s salary and thus make it worthwhile for him to vacate that post. If those arrangements couldn’t work out, Rogers even promised to pay Oliver £100 a year himself until the man (already “advanced in life”) died. These days we’d consider this scheme a kickback, a sinecure, and taxation without representation. In the British patronage system of the eighteenth century, it was common.

Rogers’s planning helps to explain why, despite his Whiggish political philosophy, he accepted the Townshend Act and resisted the non-importation effort to stop it. And his string-tugging worked. When Rogers died, the London government was preparing a commission to make him provincial secretary. Instead, in his absence the job went to Thomas Flucker.

After this letter became public in 1773, the Boston radicals interpreted it as more evidence of the Hutchinson circle scheming to take powerful positions and Customs revenue for themselves. John Adams judged that Hutchinson and Oliver had been among “the original Conspirators against the Public Liberty, since the Conspiracy was first regularly formed, and begun to be executed, in 1763 or 4,” but “Nat. Rogers, who was not one of the original’s,…came in afterwards.”

The Life and Death of Nathaniel Rogers

Nathaniel Rogers was born in Boston in 1737. His mother was a sister of Thomas Hutchinson, who later that year was chosen to be both a selectman and the town’s representative to the Massachusetts General Court.

Young Natty was orphaned as a small boy, and his Uncle Thomas raised him, treating him as another son. He didn’t attend Harvard College, but he nonetheless gained a degree by getting a master’s degree from the University of Glasgow and then asking Harvard to recognize that with a reciprocal (ad eundem) bachelor’s.

While Rogers was in Britain, he came across a copy of New-England’s Prospect by William Wood, a guide to joining the new Massachusetts Bay Colony published in 1634. This was just the sort of historical source his uncle liked. Rogers arranged for it to be reprinted in Boston in 1764, adding a long introduction that fit the founding of Massachusetts into the overall Whig history of Britain.

The political philosophy Rogers expressed in that introduction fit well alongside the arguments James Otis, Jr., was making in his pamphlets about recent Crown laws violating long established rights. In fact, James Bowdoin apparently assumed Otis wrote the introduction, writing his name into a copy.

Rogers saw himself as a Whig and a proponent of American interests. On a trip to London in 1767, he wrote to his uncle about former prime minister George Grenville:

Mr Greenville seems our most bitter enemy, & takes every opportunity to render us obnoxious. The only motion this session upon American matters was made by him, that an Enquiry should be entered into by the House upon a certain Boston paper of Octo. 5. containing the most virulent aspersions & insinuations . . .

As far as I can judge from the very short time I have been here, nothing like threatning will do here, it will serve to enflame minds already much agitated but representations supported by facts & strong reasoning will be attended to. America appears of Consequence, & the Nation in general seems interested, the Manufacturers & commercial people so far as their Interest is Affected are on our side, but all the Landed Interest are against us.

He also blamed the Customs service for having “stretched their Authority to the utmost,” which was “one great cause of their ill usage.”

Nonetheless, as Rogers’s warning against “threatning” suggests, he opposed the political methods of the Boston Whigs: public demonstrations, boycotts, harsh rhetoric in the newspapers, legislative confrontations with the governor, and of course riots. He was pleased when the Crown cracked down on his home town, writing, “We were grown into a most wretched state before the arrival of the troops. . . . the firmness of parliament will be the only cure of these Evils.”

Ultimately, Rogers was invested in the imperial patronage system. He used his connections with Lt. Gov. Hutchinson in business and in seeking royal appointments. He married into the extended Wentworth family that supplied New Hampshire with its governors, and he adopted his wife’s Anglicanism. In London he tried to line up support for himself to succeed Andrew Oliver, his uncle’s brother-in-law, as royal secretary of Massachusetts.

In the fall of 1769, Customs house records revealed that Rogers had continued to ship in goods from Britain in defiance of the non-importation agreement. A 4 October Boston town meeting condemned him along with a few other importers. That same day Hutchinson wrote to the absent governor:

Rogers…thinks himself in immediate danger and desired to know if I could protect him. I told him that if he could pitch upon any particular person he might go & make oath before a Justice of peace & he would bind him to keep the peace &c. I could do no more for him. He will not be able to hold out unless he quits the Town.

In early January 1770, William Molineux led a polite but ominous crowd to Rogers’s door. He still refused to yield—unlike his cousins, the Hutchinson brothers. Hosting British army officers in his house might have helped. But in May, with the regiments removed and the Whigs ramping up pressure, Rogers left for New York.

By then, however, Nathaniel Rogers’s name had become notorious. The Sons of Liberty paraded his effigy around the city, then hanged and burned it. He left Manhattan in the middle of the night. A few days later, another effigy appeared outside his inn on Long Island. Back in Boston in June, he found people “repeatedly breaking his windows and in a most beastly manner casting tubs of ordure at his door.” He tried New Hampshire but turned down a seat on that colony’s high court because he still held out hope for an appointment in Massachusetts.

Returning in Boston, on 9 August Rogers visited Justice Edmund Quincy to swear out a complaint against someone for harassing him. Hutchinson wrote:

As he held up his hand to swear that he had grounds to suspect the person the Justice observed a Tremor and asked if he was not well and advised him not to give himself so much concern. He had got but a few steps from the Justices door by the Post Office when he complained of being ill to a woman who stood at her shop door and who asked him in where he remain’d near half an hour fancying he should grow better but an apoplectic fit came on, his countenance changed to black instantly and before I could get to him after notice given to me he was in the Agonies of death.

Nathaniel Rogers died at the age of thirty-three, 250 years ago today.

TOMORROW: Posthumous notoriety.

Naming and Shaming the Importers

Last month I related how the “Body of the Trade” in Boston met over several days in January 1770 and wound up reenergizing the non-importation movement.

That meeting ended by naming certain merchants and shopkeepers as “importers” who refused to join the boycott of goods from Britain. Organizers had the resolves of the meeting printed as a broadside, about 14" by 5". Here’s a peek at that broadside.

The bottom of that sheet urged supporters “to paste this up over the Chimney Piece of every public House, and on every other proper Place, in every Town, in this and every other Colony, there to remain as a Monument of the Remembrance of the detestable Names above-mentioned.”

In addition, on 22 January Edes and Gill printed six importers’ names in big type at the top left of the front page of their Boston Gazette. On 12 February they ran an expanded list, as shown above. (For some reason, the first version had left out the locals who were the original focus of that public meeting: Nathaniel Rogers, William Jackson, Theophilus Lillie, and John Taylor.)

On 8 February, as described here, the Boston Whigs found another way to designate an “Importer”: with a sign in the shape of a hand set up outside Jackson’s shop. Schoolboys, let out early on Thursdays, formed a picket line under the Brazen Head, trying to keep customers away.

On 15 February, two and a half centuries ago today, Customs Collector Joseph Harrison’s anonymous informant told him: “Between the 8th & this date, most of the Importers had their Windows broke their Signs defaced, and many other marks of Resentment.” The public demonstration in the street became more elaborate that Thursday:

The Exhibition the same as last week with addition of the Effegies of some of the Importers, and below was wrote, that the Effegies of four Commissioners, five of their understrappers, with some people on the other side the water where [sic] to make their appearance on Liberty Tree the week following—

People “on the other side the water” meant officials in Britain.

There were still two army regiments in town, and that day “four soldiers of the 14th. Regt. attempted to take…down” the display. The informer stated those men were “bear of[f] and one of them much Hurt.” However, I don’t recall any soldier of the 14th Regiment complaining about this incident in the depositions they gave to Loyalist officials later that year. But the conflict was becoming more violent.

TOMORROW: What fueled those confrontations—“Junius” or juniors?

“Pool Spear informs, that last Week he heard one Kilson a Soldier…”

I’ve been looking into Pool Spear, the Boston tailor accused of tarring and feathering sailor George Gailer in October 1769.

A little more than four months after that event, the young apothecary Richard Palmes met Spear near the center of town on the evening of 5 Mar 1770. Palmes had gone out as the alarm bells rang, learned there had been a brawl outside Murray’s barracks instead of a fire, and headed back home. He stated:

I then saw Mr. Pool Spear going towards the Townhouse, he asked me if I was going home, I told him I was; I asked him where he was going that way, he said he was going to his brother David’s. But when I got to the town-pump, we were told there was a rumpus at the Custom-house door; Mr. Spear said to me you had better not go, I told him I would go and try to make peace.

Palmes appears to have had a short temper, so he probably wasn’t the best person to pacify the situation that grew into the Boston Massacre. Indeed, after hearing a shot and seeing a man dead on the ground, Palmes started swinging his walking stick at soldiers and Capt. Thomas Preston.

It looks like Pool Spear took his own advice and didn’t stay to see what happened near the Customs office that night. But the next morning he went to Faneuil Hall, where there was supposed to be a town meeting, to share a story. The town meeting records say:

Mr. Pool Spear informs, that last Week he heard one Kilson a Soldier of Pharras Company say, that he did not know what the Inhabitants were after, for that they had broke an Officers Windows (meaning [landlord] Nathaniel Roger’s Windows) but that they had a scheeme on foot which would soon put a stop to our proceedure—that Parties of Soldiers were ordered with Pistols in their Pockets, and to fire upon those who should assault said House again, and that Ten Pounds Sterling was to be given as a Reward, for their killing one of those Persons, and fifty pounds sterling for a Prisoner—

Spear’s testimony wasn’t used in the town’s report or the trials as Palmes’s was, but it reflects the conviction of many Bostonians that the soldiers were eager to hurt people.

The next glimpse of Pool Spear that I’ve found comes from the siege of Boston. He and his wife Christiana were staying in her home town of Pembroke with six children. In March 1776, the Rhode Island Quaker philanthropist John Brown gave them £2 as charity.

The Spear family moved back into Boston after the British evacuation. Late that year Pool (now spelling his name “Poole”) was among scores of Bostonians who signed a petition on behalf of Hopestill Capen, a Sandemanian Loyalist who had helped to preserve their property during the siege but was locked up in the Boston jail on suspicion of disloyalty.

In 1779, the Boston town meeting elected Pool Spear, then forty-four years old, to be a constable. Often the meeting chose recently married young men for this office as a joke, and those men declined because they wanted to stay home. Spear accepted and was reelected in 1780 and later. The Fleets’ pocket almanac for 1782 lists him as a deputy sheriff of Suffolk County. Those jobs were more about delivering writs than patrolling the town, but it’s still a striking shift from being accused of tarring and feathering a man to working as a law-enforcement officer.

Also in 1779, the Independent Chronicle newspaper reported that the Spears were living in a house that the state was confiscating from the late Loyalist absentee John Borland. Six years later, Spear was in the Boston jail himself because of a debt to Borland’s estate, as brought to court by Richard Cranch. (See this note from the Adams Papers about Cranch’s tangled relationships with the Borland properties.) The court case may have involved that Boston house or Spear’s duties as a sheriff. In any event, the Massachusetts General Court passed a special law freeing Spear.

Pool Spear died in 1787, aged fifty-one. His widow Christiana helped to administer his estate. He didn’t leave her a lot of money, but he didn’t leave her in debt.

TOMORROW: The third tailor.

The “Hutchinson Letters” Published at Last

I’ve been tracing the maneuvers in 1773 around the “Hutchinson letters.” Benjamin Franklin sent those documents to the speaker of the Massachusetts house under conditions of secrecy. The Massachusetts Whigs nibbled away at the edges of that promise until in June they just decided to publish.

Edes and Gill issued the letters about Massachusetts in pamphlet form. (Their first edition omitted the letters from others about Connecticut and Rhode Island.) Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy reprinted them all over the following weeks. Here is a British reprinting of the letters, plus a defense of them and an attack on Franklin for divulging them.

In order of publication, those documents were:

• Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, 18 June 1768, on the Liberty seizure and riot.
• Hutchinson, August 1768, on protests against the Customs Commissioners.
• Hutchinson, 4 Oct 1768, on unrest and the landing of the regiments.
• Robert Auchmuty to Hutchinson, 14 Sept 1768, warning about a death threat (enclosed with the above).
• Hutchinson, 10 Dec 1768, on actions of the Massachusetts Council.
• Hutchinson, 20 Jan 1769, on Parliament’s relationship to Massachusetts. (This is the letter that stated, “There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties.”)
• Hutchinson, 26 Oct 1769, on the non-importation boycott and Gov. Francis Bernard’s departure.
• Secretary Andrew Oliver (shown above), 7 May 1767, on the problems of an elected Council, his salary, and other matters.
• Oliver, 11 May 1768, on protests against the lieutenant governor and Customs Commissioners.
• Oliver, 13 Feb 1769, with ideas for changing the Council to be independent of the lower house.
• Oliver, 12 Aug 1769 from New York on colonial business, non-importation, and his appointment.
• Customs Commissioner Charles Paxton, 20 June 1768 from H.M.S. Romney, on the Liberty riot. (Very short.)
• Nathaniel Rogers (Hutchinson’s nephew), 12 Dec 1768, seeking Oliver’s position if Hutchinson moved up to become governor and Oliver moved up to become lieutenant governor.

As Hutchinson pointed out after the publication, his letters never proposed new laws or changes to the Massachusetts charter. (Oliver mused on such possibilities, and the letters from Rhode Island and Connecticut were open about change.) Hutchinson’s phrase “an abridgment of what are called English liberties” came after a lament about the distance between North America and London; in his mind, it was a statement of regrettable fact, not a prescription.

Neither Hutchinson nor Oliver suggested sending troops into Boston to keep order. As Hutchinson noted, his report on the Liberty riot couldn’t have reached London until the ministry already had those plans under weigh.

Finally, Hutchinson pointed out that in the year before these letters leaked, he had engaged in a public debate with the Massachusetts house about the relationship between the elected colonial government and the royal authorities, making the same points he had made in his letters. So how could he have engaged in a secret conspiracy?

Nonetheless, the letters destroyed Hutchinson’s credibility and political career in Massachusetts.

TOMORROW: What was wrong with the letters.

The Limits on Fatal Violence in Boston, 1765-1774

Though Boston earned a reputation as a riotous town in the ten years after the first public Stamp Act protests of 1765, those Boston rioters never killed anyone.

A mob did ruin Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s North End mansion in 1765, and damaged several other royal officials’ houses in the same months. In 1768, the Customs service’s seizure of John Hancock’s ship Liberty prompted another crowd to manhandle three Customs officials.

The next year, Bostonians learned the ritual of tarring and feathering, which they inflicted on several lower-level Customs employees over the next few years. But those actions all stopped short of killing people.

There are examples from elsewhere in New England of fatal, or nearly fatal, resistance to the Crown. In April 1769, as detailed here, sailors out of Marblehead resisting impressment into the Royal Navy killed Lt. Henry Panton at sea.

During the Gaspée seizure of 1772, the Rhode Islanders storming that Royal Navy vessel shot its commander, Lt. William Dudingston, in the chest—which sure sounds like he could have been killed. But he survived with medical care. Guns were also fired, though not hitting anyone, during some rural demonstrations against mandamus Council members in the fall of 1774.

One might argue that the lack of fatalities in Boston riots was only a matter of luck. There were some close calls:

• After Ebenezer Richardson shot Christopher Seider on 22 Feb 1770, he was nearly lynched by an angry crowd. The Whig leader William Molineux insisted on taking the unpopular Customs employee to a magistrate for indictment.
• Later that year, a crowd frightened importer Patrick McMaster with tar and feathers so badly he collapsed.
• In 1774, a mob attacked John Malcolm, yet another Customs employee, after he clubbed George Robert Twelves Hewes. That attack lasted for hours, and involved choking Malcolm with a noose as well as beating, whipping, and tarring and feathering him. But he survived.

In addition, Hutchinson felt that his nephew Nathaniel Rogers was hounded to an untimely death in 1770.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that during those tumultuous years no Crown official, soldier, or supporter was killed in political violence in Boston. In contrast, during a month-long stretch of early 1770 employees of the royal government shot dead four men and two boys, and wounded several more. A big reason for that difference was that Bostonians didn’t use guns in their conflicts, preferring to intimidate their opponents through numbers.

On 18 Oct 1774, an angry sailor named Samuel Dyer broke that pattern. He attacked two Royal Artillery officers at noon on Boston’s main street, firing pistols at their heads. Both his guns misfired, but the army naturally saw Dyer’s actions as an escalation.

I’ll talk about Dyer, his claims of mistreatment, what the record actually shows, and how his assault with deadly weapons might have started the American War off quite differently at this Saturday’s History Camp.

John Carnes: “in the grocery-way”

As I described yesterday, in 1764 the Rev. John Carnes finished his second unhappy stretch in a pulpit and came home to Boston. He gave a few more sermons, but apparently gave up the idea of trying to find another minister’s post. Instead, Carnes decided to go into business.

Carnes opened a shop on Orange Street (now Washington Street) in the South End of Boston. He applied for a license to sell liquor, which the Boston selectmen didn’t grant until 1766. I haven’t found any advertisements from him in the newspapers announcing what he had for sale, but he did advertise after a robbery at his store in 1769. The notice indicates that Carnes sold cloth, shoes and stockings, penknives, notions, and other goods.

Carnes stayed out of Boston’s pre-Revolutionary politics, except for one odd moment. On 25 Jan 1770 Christopher Prince published an open letter in the Boston News-Letter asking Edes and Gill, the printers of the rival Boston Gazette:

in what Manner I am to obtain Satisfaction of two Person in this Town, who have attempted without the least Foundation to blacken my Character, in an artful Piece in your Paper of last Monday.

One of which Persons I strongly suspect is a quondam Parson, and twice separated from this People, for Reasons best known to himself, and from a Preacher of the Gospel now follows the laudable Calling of retailing Rum to the Soldiers at the South Part of the Town.

The horrible act that the Gazette writer had accused Prince of doing was recommending that a man from Leicester buy from Nathaniel Rogers, a nephew of Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson who had at first refused to sign the non-importation agreement, then agreed to do so, then backed out again. Prince insisted that at the time he hadn’t known about that last part.

In the 29 January Gazette Carnes responded with a long letter denying that he had written the earlier essay, and then accusing Prince of doing exactly what it said. As to the sneers against himself, Carnes wrote:

In respect to my being in the laudable Business of Retailing, it is the Fruit of Necessity, and very usual with all persons who are in the grocery-way in the south part of the town where I live.—But how low? how false the suggestion of my selling Rum to the soldiers? Tis true when I first sold liquors, I sold them indiscriminately to all customers; but as soon as I was convinced of the impropriety of supplying the soldiers with that article, I refused to let them have any; and Mr. Prince being a neighbor, must I think have known, that for near eight months past, I have declined selling to them.

Carnes went on to accuse Prince of behaving “like a true Italian, hugging a man in his arms, while that moment he determines to stab him.” (Carnes had probably never met an Italian in his life.) And he concluded about his neighbor’s remarks:

I need no public vindication, other than that has been given me by such their superiors, and consequently am compell’d to despise the little attempt made to injure my character, by a dirty Fellow, remarkable for his want of Education, and may I not add, remarkable for Profanity and Impudence?

Things must have been pleasant along Orange Street that winter.

COMING UP: John Carnes in the siege of Boston.