Summing Up the Evidence on the Marshfield Tea Burning

Last week, inspired by today’s reenactment of the tea burning in Marshfield, I traced all the sources I could find about that event.

I found no contemporaneous or first-person account. The earliest description appeared in an 1854, and more details dribbled out over the next century and beyond, based on either family lore or no stated authority at all.

Hazy as that local tradition is, I nonetheless believe that people in Marshfield did burn tea in the wake of the Boston Tea Party.

The 1854 story echoes what happened in other Massachusetts communities, such as Salem, Lexington, and Newburyport.

First, the community agreed unofficially not to drink or sell tea to show their opposition to the Tea Act (not because the retail price of tea was too high). Local Whig leaders confiscated that form of property from shops and locked it up. Then something spurred younger, more radical Whigs to take the tea and make a show of burning it.

The 1854 report said Nehemiah Thomas confiscated the tea, and contemporaneous documents show he was indeed the town’s senior Whig, clerk, treasurer, and deacon. But that report also said he wasn’t in town for the burning.

Instead, late in the nineteenth century authors attached two brothers-in-law to the story: Jeremiah Low, who would have descendants in Marshfield, and Benjamin White, also documented as a Whig activist in this period. Plus other, unnamed citizens.

In the twentieth century local historians pointed to a very old building as one of the places the tea was stored. That’s plausible; in the 1770s the building was an ordinary, or tavern, and towns did use public houses for public business. That said, there might have been appeal in linking this rare surviving building to a historic event, providing a focus for commemoration. So I’m a little less convinced about that claim.

I’m still left puzzling about some details of this event, however. Here are my unanswered questions.

A. Starting with a history of the White family in 1895, authors describe Marshfield’s Tea Rock as “flat on ye top,” “flatt on ye top,” and “upon a stone quite flat on top”—all of those phrases within quotation marks. That implies they were quoting from a source. But none of those authors explains where those words come from, and a Google Books search turns up nothing. Is there a missing source?

B. In 1929 the Boston Herald said that after setting fire to the tea Jeremiah Low “was later forced to flee to New York with his family.” While not making an explicit connection, that article and local authors who repeated the information implied that the Lows had to leave town because of their Whig activity.

Whoever wrote that article certainly got some information from Low’s descendants. The reporter also wrote that “a fourth generation descendant of Jeremiah” was Seth Low [1850–1916], president of Columbia University and a reform mayor of New York.

However, L. E. Fredman’s article on Mayor Low in the Journal of American Studies in 1972 and online genealogies say the man was descended from a Low family in Ipswich and Salem, not Marshfield.

Furthermore, for most of the decade after 1773 Marshfield was a safe place for Whigs while New York was where Loyalists found refuge. So what was the real basis of this family lore? What had been lost or added?

C. What was the source for Cynthia Hagar Krusell’s statement in Of Tea and Tories (1976) that the Marshfield tea-burning occurred on the night of 19 Dec 1773? Was that just the first Sunday after the Boston Tea Party? If the event occurred when Nehemiah Thomas was out of town on some legislative business, as late-1800s sources suggest, that would have been late 1774 or afterward.

“Three days after the Boston Tea Party”

In 1966, Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson established the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission.

That body would accomplish little, but it shows that some Americans were looking ahead to the anniversaries of the Revolution.

On 16 December of that year, the Disabled American Veterans of Massachusetts performed a reenactment of the Boston Tea Party. The first replica ship wouldn’t open for another seven years, so they used another sailing vessel moored along the waterfront.

The next day, people in Marshfield reenacted the burning of tea in their town. According to the Quincy Patriot-Ledger, this commemoration took place “at the foot of Tea Rock Hill.” The tea was paraded from “the old Proctor Bourne Store (now LaForest’s),” and a Bourne descendant set it alight. There was a handbell choir.

The Patriot-Ledger’s stories on the event, both before and after, quoted liberally from Joseph C. Hagar’s tercentenary history of Marshfield, as I did yesterday.

The newspaper said the tea-burning in Marshfield happened “a few nights after the famous Boston Harbor event in December, 1773,” but was no more specific than that.

Ten years later, a Bicentennial publication pinned the event to a specific date. Of Tea and Tories was written by Cynthia Hagar Krusell, a granddaughter of Joseph C. Hagar and also a descendant of someone named Thomas involved in the original burning. (Two families named Thomas were among the first English settlers in the town, so by 1773 this could mean any number of people.)

Krusell was vice-chairman of the Marshfield Bicentennial Committee, which published her booklet in 1976. A trained artist, she drew a map and genealogies for it. About the tea-burning she wrote:

The first rebel action occurred at midnight December 19, 1773, three days after the Boston Tea Party. A band of local Patriots, emboldened by fellow rebels in Boston, crept by night into the John Bourne ordinary by the town training green. They seized boxes of British tea stored there and in Nehemiah Thomas’s cellar, piled them on an ox-drawn wagon and silently bore them to “a stone quite flat on top” which stood on the crest of a nearby hill, thereafter immortalized as Tea Rock Hill.

Sensing the impact of the moment, they knelt in humble prayer while Jeremiah Lowe touched the tea with his torch, igniting simultaneously the spark of Revolutionary fervor in Marshfield.

So far as I can tell, Krusell’s publication was the first to specify a date for the burning, 19 December. But she didn’t cite evidence for that detail or others. Nothing in her list of sources leaps out to suggest the date came from a diary or other document that previous historians hadn’t seen.

In 1773, the 19th of December was a Sunday. People gathered in their congregations, and they probably did discuss the destruction of the tea in Boston. However, New Englanders tended not to carry out political actions from Saturday night through Sunday night, viewing that stretch as the Sabbath.

COMING UP: After a Thanksgiving break, lingering questions.

(I couldn’t find good photographs of the 1966 reenactments. The photo above, courtesy of Digital Commonwealth, shows a different Disabled American Veterans demonstration aboard the recreated tea ship Beaver, probably in 1979 or 1980, since the group was protesting Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.)

The Tercentenary Telling of the Marshfield Tea Burning

In 1940, the town of Marshfield celebrated the 300th anniversary of its founding.

Among the projects of the Tercentenary Committee was the publication of a new town history assembled by Joseph C. Hagar, who had succeeded Lysander S. Richards as head of the local historical society.

That book’s title page says: Marshfield 70°–40´W : 42°–5´N: The Autobiography of a Puritan Town. Book cataloguers have been divided on whether the title includes that longitude and latitude, or whether they’re just too much trouble.

On the burning of tea in the town, Hagar wrote:

The British had brought a large quantity of tea to the town, which they were unable to sell on account of the high price. They stored it in various places in the village.

On the southwest side of the old Marshfield Training Green is a hill on which now stands quite a modern residence. This hill is known as Tea Rock Hill, although the rock itself has been blasted and pieces used in the foundations of two nearby homes. The ledge, however, is still visible.

Not far away toward the South river, but northeast from the hill, stands the former old John Bourne store, now a fairly modern Post Office. The store was built in 1709. Toward the east are two houses of interest, both being old Thomas homes. . . . [One was] the residence of Nehemiah Thomas; and in his cellar was stored some of the tea which had been brought into the town. More tea was stored in the old Bourne store.

A few days after the Boston Tea Party, the enthusiastic patriots of Marshfield (one of whom, Jonathan Bourne, fought in the battle of Bunker Hill) marched quietly and earnestly to these places and secured the tea there stored. This act required courage and conviction as Marshfield had such a strong Tory element. The tea was loaded onto an ox-cart and hauled to Tea Rock Hill.

Among the patriots were women and children as well as men. Mr. Charles Peterson remembers that his grandmother told him she was one of the group.

On the top of the hill they placed the tea “upon a stone quite flat on top” and as it was evening, they knelt in the dim light of the primitive lanterns and offered prayer. A torch carried by Jeremiah Lowe was applied to the tea and it was burned. Jeremiah Lowe was later forced to flee to New York with his family.

Hagar’s book doesn’t cite evidence for specific statements. It echoes passages from sources like the D.A.R. description of the event, sometimes word for word, without acknowledgment. It contains errors. (There was no Jonathan Bourne, for instance.) All that makes it a frustrating source to work with, but it was the towns’s official tercentenary history.

This book adds a couple of details to the story of the tea burning, such as the pause for prayer before the bonfire—apparently based on what Charles Petersen’s grandmother told him.

Most important, Hagar’s recounting specified a new location for the stash of confiscated tea: “the former old John Bourne store.” In terms of commemoration, that had a couple of advantages over Deacon Nehemiah Thomas’s house, the only place previously named:

• First, it was closer to Tea Rock Hill, making for a more compact commemoration.
• Second, it still existed, albeit as a part of a larger building.

That building still stands today, as shown above in a photograph from Patrick Browne’s article at Historical Digressions.

TOMORROW: Two generations on, and the first reenactment.

“We have a rock that is a relic of the Revolution”

The wonderfully named Lysander Salmon Richards (1835–1926, shown here) published a two-volume History of Marshfield in 1901 and 1905.

In the first volume he summed up what authors of the previous century had written about how locals had burned tea during the fraught last weeks of 1773:

We do not have in Marshfield an historic rock, like Plymouth Rock, a relic of the Pilgrims, but we have a rock that is a relic of the Revolution. When the Boston Tea Party threw overboard in the Boston Harbor all the tea on the ships in the harbor, the patriots of Marshfield learned there was a large quantity of tea secreted by some authorities in the cellar of a house on the site now occupied by Mr. Seaverns, two or three hundred feet from the street leading from the First Congregational church to the Marshfield station.

The Marshfield patriots, not to be outdone by the Boston tea sinkers, marched to the said house and demanded the tea. Resistance being useless, it was given up and carried to a rock on a hill directly opposite Dr. Stephen Henry’s residence, not far from the First Congregational church, and there heaped upon this huge rock, it was set afire and burned to ashes. This rock (what there is remaining of it) has since been called “Tea Rock.”

In the second volume Richards included a close rewrite of what members of the White family had written about their ancestor ten years before:

Mr. [Benjamin] White was commissioned to collect the tea after it was voted not to drink it. They stored it in the house of Nehemiah Thomas. Saving the tea at that time did not satisfy those earnest, honest whigs, so they took this confiscated article and carried it into a nearby field, where there was a large rock, “flatt on ye top,” pouring it thereon, and then Mr. White and his brother-in-law, Jeremiah Low, (two staunch old whigs,) applied the torch amid rejoicings.

To compare those paragraphs with the passages I quoted yesterday, it looks like Richards didn’t add any facts to the story besides who lived in the houses in his time.

By that point, the landscape of Revolutionary Marshfield had changed—literally. To the dismay of the town’s first chronicler, Marcia A. Thomas, Tea Rock had been blasted into pieces, some of them used for the foundations of nearby houses. That’s why Richards wrote, “what there is remaining of it.” Nehemiah Thomas’s house was also gone.

Some Marshfield residents were determined to keep that story alive, though. In 1916 the town some local women established the Tea Rock Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. On 5 Aug 1929 they unveiled a historic marker on Tea Rock Hill.

The next day’s Boston Herald laid out that generation’s understanding of the historic event:

…the men of Marshfield…in December, 1773, burned tea brought here by the British after the latter had failed to sell it to the public at a high price.

So much of the tea remained unsold that the British stored it in various parts of the village. Then, one night, patriots raided these places, loaded the tea onto an ox cart, hauled it to the top of the elevation known as Tea Rock hill, on which the residence of Elijah Ames now stands, and burned it.

The torch was applied by Jeremiah Lowe, who was later forced to flee to New York with his family. . . . John and Mary Ford, children of Edward Ford of Marshfield, direct descendants of Jeremiah Lowe, assisted in unveiling the tablet, which is affixed to a large granite boulder.

The memorial is inscribed as follows:
“On this hill, in December, 1773, the staunch Whig, Jeremiah Lowe, applied the torch which burned the tea confiscated by the patriots from the public and private stores of the town of Marshfield. Erected by Tea Rock Chapter, D.A.R. of Marshfield, 1929.” . . .

Miss Louise Wardsworth, regent of Tea Rock Chapter, read the history of the burning of the tea, and vocal solos were given by Miss Elsie Sennott.

The story had changed in the quarter-century since Richards’s writing. For some reason, the problem with the tea was that it was too expensive, not that it was taxed. An ox cart made its first appearance in the story, though it would have been a logical assumption before. The tea came from several unstated locations, not just Nehemiah Thomas’s house. Indeed, there was no mention of Thomas or Benjamin White, another documented political leader of the time. Only Jeremiah Low’s name was molded into the tablet.

TOMORROW: Objections and details.

Bad Day at Tea Rock

As I recounted back in 2016, Marshfield was unusually split in the last years before the war. Some influential men supported the Crown, and some opposed it.

Control of town meetings went back and forth, and the faction that was outvoted in the official meeting would gather and grumble about the results.

One documented leader of the local resistance was Nehemiah Thomas (1712–1782), both treasurer and clerk for the town as well as a deacon at the meetinghouse.

Another was Benjamin White (1725–1783), who sometimes filled in as clerk and would also represent the town in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.

In late 1773 Marshfield got into a tussle over tea. The official side of that dispute is documented in the record of a town meeting on 31 Jan 1774 that protested the Boston Tea Party, and then a protest against that protest, both published in the Boston newspapers.

However, there appears to have been more direct action in December, not described in writing until decades later.

The first mention of this incident I’ve found was in Marcia A. Thomas’s Memorials of Marshfield (1854):

While [Nehemiah Thomas was] absent, on one of these occasions, the whigs of the vicinity, in the ardor of their patriotism, took from his house, contrary to his intention, a quantity which had been seized by them and deposited there. This was burnt on a rock, near the meetinghouse, with much eclat. This was known afterwards as Tea Rock.

In the 13 Sept 1869 Springfield Republican I found this:

A few rods from the Marshfield post-office is “Tea-rock hill.” During the revolutionary period all the tea was secreted in the entry of one of the colonists. While he was at Boston, attending the Continental Congress [sic], a few ardent whigs, who did not believe in the soothing qualities of tea bearing a British tax, seized and burned it upon the hill’s summit.

L. Vernon Briggs’s History of Shipbuilding on North River (1889) devoted a footnote to the memories of Isaac Thomas (1765–1859), including:

He saw the burning of the obnoxious tea on the height which yet bears its name, and saw the torch touched to the fire fated pile by that devoted Whig, Jeremiah Low.

Thomas and Samuel White’s family history published in 1895 stated:

Benjamin White was one of the committee to collect the tea after it was voted not to use it, and it was stored in Nehemiah Thomas’s house. He did not feel satisfied with this, it looked as if saved for future use. When the Whigs of the vicinity, in the ardor of their patriotism, seized this tea, carrying it into a field near by, where there was a large rock which was “flat on ye top,” poured the tea thereon, when Benjamin White and his brother-in-law, Jeremiah Low, two staunch old Whigs, God bless them! applied the torch with much rejoicing. This was known ever afterwards as “Tea Rock.”

The following year, Caleb A. Wall borrowed much of that language for The Historic Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773.

TOMORROW: Traditions in the twentieth century.

[The photograph of the marker on Marshfield’s Tea Rock Hill comes from Patrick Browne, who in his Historical Digression blog synthesized the accounts of the town’s tea-burning.]

The Mystery of Marshfield’s “many ill disposed people”

I’ve been tracing the political back-and-forth in Marshfield, Massachusetts, often labeled a “Tory town” but more clearly a split town.

When the story left off, the Patriot faction was in the ascendancy. Loyalist leader Nathaniel Ray Thomas had been chased out of Marshfield by crowds from the neighboring communities. As its legislative representative the town had replaced Loyalist Abijah White with a moderate Whig, town clerk and treasurer Nehemiah Thomas. A public meeting had then approved sending him to the extralegal Massachusetts Provincial Congress.

But that wasn’t the end of the seesawing. In January 1775 Abijah White and four other citizens of Marshfield, all also named White, plus five men from neighboring Scituate “In behalf of ourselves and our Associates” wrote to the royal governor, Gen. Thomas Gage:

We the Subscribers Inhabitants of Scituate and Marshfield, being loyall Subjects of his Majesty King George the Third, desireous of Supporting his Crown, & dignity and the Laws of Great Brittain, But being insulted, our persons and property’s threatned by many ill disposed people, who declare their intention of Assembling in great numbers to Attack & destroy us and many others among us who are determined as far as in us lies to Support the Laws of the Realm, and repel by force every unlawfull Attempt to destroy his Majestys good Government over us, Desire we may be Assisted with One Hundred of his Majestys troops to repair to Marshfield as Soon as conveniently may (or such number as may be thought proper) by whose Assistance we will to the Utmost of our power repel and resist any violent or rebellious attempt that may be made against us, or any other of his Majesty’s loyall & peaceable Subjects whom we can protect there are about two Hundred & forty in Marshfield & Scituate who are loyally disposed & who we have good reason to believe will stand forth in Support of his Majestys Government:

That brings us back to the moment when I started this series of posts, the arrival of Capt. Nisbet Balfour and one hundred soldiers, two drummers, four corporals, four sergeants, and three subaltern officers in Marshfield on 23 Jan 1775.

It’s unclear to me whether Nathaniel Ray Thomas was back on his large farm by that time or came back with the troops. In any event, he hosted most of the hundred soldiers while others lived at a nearby tavern belonging to a man the Boston Evening-Post called “Tory White.”

And that tilted the political seesaw once again. As I quoted back here, in February the Loyalists had the numbers to control the town meeting, and they voted official thanks to Gage and Adm. Samuel Graves for providing military support. Sixty-four men left in the minority could do no more than issue a public protest. That’s how the situation remained when the war began.

What were the tensions underlying Marshfield’s split? As of October 1765, the town had appeared united against the Stamp Act, calling it “so terrible a calamity as threatens this Province” and urging its representative to respect the Stamp Act Congress in New York. (Marshfield also condemned “the late riotous proceedings in the town of Boston,” but even Boston was embarrassed about those.) The committee who drew up that anti-Crown message included future Loyalists Abijah White and Nathaniel Ray Thomas as well as future Whig Nehemiah Thomas. So whatever divided the town so deeply and evenly appears to have happened in the next eight years.

Unlike in some other communities I’ve seen, this conflict wasn’t between people whose ancestors had joined the Puritan migration of the early 1600s and other families who had arrived more recently and thus felt a tighter tie to Britain. All the men involved had ancestors among the town’s earliest English settlers.

Nor did this political divide seem to reflect old feuds between families. Certainly family networks were involved in each side’s organizing—as in, for instance, all those Whites asking for troops. But other members of that family were Patriots, such as Benjamin White, who took the responsibility of hiding the town militia company’s gunpowder away from those regulars at his house near the town border.

Likewise, the old Little and Winslow families had politically active members on both sides of the conflict. Nathaniel Ray Thomas and Nehemiah Thomas actually descended from two different early settlers surnamed Thomas, but all the families had intermarried, so it looks very hard to draw lines between them.

Geography played some role in the disagreements. Like a lot of old Massachusetts towns, Marshfield had more than one village by this point, and people living in one spot clamored not to have to go all the way to the old town center for worship, town meetings, and school. A second Congregational meeting had been established in the northern part of town in 1738, called the “Chapel of Ease.”

I mentioned how a proposal to annex part of Scituate, to the west, had become an area of contention between almost evenly matched parties in the early 1770s. Sometime in 1774 the town voted that “one-half of the annual town meeting for the future shall be held & kept at the North meeting house.” In contrast, when Marshfield voted to participate in the Provincial Congress, the body met “at the South meeting house.” And the people who protested the town’s thank-you message to Gen. Gage complained that meeting had been “held in a part of the Town where a Town Meeting was never before had.”

Yet there doesn’t seem to have been one neighborhood where all the Loyalists lived. Crown supporters Nathaniel Ray Thomas and Dr. Isaac Winslow lived in the south part of town, as did Whig Nehemiah Thomas and radical young men like Benjamin White.

The weather may have been a factor in which party won votes at town meetings, especially if that factor was combined with having to travel longer. Generally the pro-Crown party prevailed at meetings held in January through March while the pro-Whig party won votes from June through October. But that might be just an artifact of incomplete records and turbulent years.

TOMORROW: Was the Rev. Ebenezer Thompson a factor in Marshfield’s split?

The Political Seesaw in 1774 Marshfield

As the year 1774 began, the Loyalist party in Marshfield was on top, pushing through a town-meeting resolution disapproving of the destruction of tea in Boston harbor the previous month. (And implicitly of the burning of tea in Marshfield itself.)

The town’s representative to the Massachusetts General Court, Abijah White, leaned toward the Crown; he made sure that resolution was published in the Boston papers. White’s fellow selectmen, Dr. Isaac Winslow and Ephraim Little, were also Loyalists. And behind them was Nathaniel Ray Thomas, whose estate was said to be the largest in Plymouth County.

But already those men were reported to be worried about violent opposition from their neighbors. A letter from Duxbury dated 5 February and appearing in the 14 February Boston Gazette claimed:

We hear from Marshfield that the puissant A[bijah] W[hite] Esq. lately went into a neighbor’s house and being seated, tho’ very uneasy, he was inquired of what made him so, when he instantly arose and drew forth a Sword, (being formerly a valiant Soldier) declaring he would make Day-light shine thro’ ’em, but what he would carry his Point, giving as a Reason, that he was afraid of his Life without being arm’d, tho’ never assaulted. Being thus accout’red, one Day on going to his Barn, his Cattle being affrighted, and taking him to be a Stranger, surrounded him, and we hear ’twas with Difficulty that he escaped with his Life and the Loss of his Sword.

Within months, however, the imperial government’s response to the same Boston Tea Party prompted a popular response that reversed the situation in Marshfield. First came the Boston Port Bill and the return of the British army to Boston. Then came the Massachusetts Government Act, permanently changing the province’s constitution in ways large and small.

Along with the latter law came London’s list of members of the new Massachusetts Council, appointed rather than elected. And among those gentlemen, chosen for their loyalty to the royal government, was Nathaniel Ray Thomas. He took his oath of office in Salem on 16 Aug 1774.

Already the Massachusetts people were rising up against those new measures, starting in the western part of the province. That opposition took two main forms: preventing the county courts from opening and trying to intimidate Councilors into resigning. In both types of action, men turned out in their militia units. That was an easy way for them to organize and maintain discipline, a demonstration of how they represented the bulk of the people, and an implicit threat of force.

On 2 September the “Powder Alarm” took place in Cambridge, a response to Gen. Thomas Gage‘s securing militia gunpowder and cannon for the Crown. Thousands of Middlesex County men marched into town and demanded the resignation of two Councilors from Cambridge, as well as Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver (whose resignation was so clearly coerced that no one believed it—see the opening chapters of The Road to Concord for more detail).

That emboldened the Whigs of Plymouth County, and on 6 September crowds from several towns around Marshfield headed for Nathaniel Ray Thomas’s large house, determined to force him to resign from the Council. The 12 September Boston Gazette reported:

We hear from the County of Plymouth, that last Wednesday upwards of 2000 of the substantial Yeomanry, collected from the several Towns of Plymouth, Hanover, and Pembroke, repaired to the House of Nathaniel Ray Thomas of Marshfield, one of the new Council; but he having had some previous Intimation of the intended Visit of the People, he thought it unsafe to remain even in Marshfield, and accordingly fled the night before with all Speed to the city of Refuge.

With Councilor Thomas gone and other Loyalists perhaps cowed, Marshfield’s town meeting flipped. Later in September the town elected moderate Whig Nehemiah Thomas instead of Abijah White to represent it at the General Court. In October the men of Marshfield met again in the south meetinghouse and confirmed that their town clerk should take a seat in the Provincial Congress, disregarding any complaints about its legality.

TOMORROW: The seesaw tilts again.

Was Marshfield a Tory Town?

Because Marshfield officially voted to thank Gov. Thomas Gage for sending troops in the winter of 1775, it got a lasting reputation as a “Tory town.”

And indeed Marshfield had many more Loyalists than neighboring towns. Or at least the creation of its Association meant it had more visible, undeniable Loyalists. Men who would have remained quiet in other communities put their names on papers supporting the Crown in Marshfield.

But there was also a vocal minority against those troops, so I’d say it wasn’t so much a Tory town as a politically split town. And that was notable in itself.

New England communities liked consensus. Men were supposed to debate and consider measures thoroughly, but when it came time to vote one side was supposed to win decisively—not just by a “trifling” margin. Town clerks tended not to even record vote counts, and they took other steps to play down disagreements in the public record.

In contrast, the men of Marshfield had been split almost evenly for at least a few years. In June 1772 the town considered whether to annex a section of Scituate called “Two Mile” and rejected the idea. But the following March men from Scituate brought up the proposal again, and the town meeting voted to consider the idea—“there being 50 votes for it, and 49 against,” town clerk, treasurer, and deacon Nehemiah Thomas recorded. (The actual annexation didn’t take place until after the war.)

During the tea crisis of late 1773, Nehemiah Thomas led the town elders in confiscating tea before it could cause trouble. A couple of days after the Boston Tea Party, more radical Whigs demanded that tea—some sources say took it from Thomas’s house while he was away—and publicly burned it. The site of that burning is now Tea Rock Hill, shown above. So there was definitely a strong anti-tea faction in town.

Yet at the end of January 1774, the pro-Crown selectmen called a town meeting, as reported by the Boston News-Letter. Under the leadership of Nathaniel Ray Thomas (who asked for special permission to express his own opinion, not just moderate), that meeting resolved:

This Town taking into Consideration the late tumultuous and as we think illegal Proceedings in the Town of Boston in the Detention and Destruction of the Teas belonging to the East-India Company, which we apprehend will effect our Properties if not our Liberties, think it our indispensible Duty to show our Disapprobation of such Measures and Proceedings

The Boston Gazette responded on 7 February, “We are informed that the Resolves of the Town of Marshfield were carried by a Majority of only one Vote; and we soon expect a more intelligible account of the Meeting than has yet been given in a public paper.” And one week later fifty-one men from Marshfield, including clerk Nehemiah Thomas, signed a protest, also published in the Gazette:

…they say that the measures and proceedings in the town of Boston in the detention & destruction of the teas, belonging to the East India Co. are illegal, unjust & of a dangerous tendency, against which we take the liberty to protest. . . .

The occasion of this our protest has given us great uneasiness & we are confident those extraordinary resolves would not have taken place but by the insinuations of a certain gentleman who seems willing his constituents should share in the resentment of the whole country, which he has incurred by his conduct in a public character. We mean not to countenance riotous and disorderly conduct, but, being convinced that liberty is the life and happiness of a community, we are determined to contribute to our last mite in its defence against the machinations of assuming, arbitrary men, who, stimulated with a lust of dominion & unrighteous gain are ever studying to subjugate this free people.

Marshfield’s political arguments were already spilling out into the Boston newspapers before any British troops arrived.

TOMORROW: The political seesaw of late 1774.

[Above is the rarely visited historical marker on Marshfield’s Tea Rock Hill, photographed by Patrick Browne. His Historical Digression blog offers a thorough discussion of the Marshfield tea-burning, as well as the “almost battle” of Marshfield.]

Marshfield Voters “greatly aggrieved at the conduct of the said Town”

As I described yesterday, in February 1775 Marshfield’s Loyalist selectmen led a town meeting in voting to publicly thank Gen. Thomas Gage and Adm. Samuel Graves for providing them with military assistance.

At the time there slightly more than one hundred regulars barracked in the town, and a Royal Navy gunship off shore.

As town clerk, Nehemiah Thomas (represented here by his gravestone, courtesy of Find-a-Grave) kept the record of that meeting, but he wasn’t a Loyalist. He was the town’s representative at the Massachusetts Provincial Congress that the meeting formally objected to. Thomas was most likely one of the sixty-four local men who signed a public protest against those proceedings:

We, the subscribers, inhabitants of the Town of Marshfield, being greatly aggrieved at the conduct of the said Town at their late meeting, on the 20th of February last, and sensible of the high colouring which the Tories never fail to bestow on every thing that turns in their favour, think ourselves obliged in duty to our King, our country, ourselves, and posterity, to remonstrate and declare,

First, That it is our opinion, that the Selectmen of the Town of Marshfield, with a design to answer a purpose, having previously raised the State Bill, which increased the number of voters in the Tory, more than in the Whig interest, so far availed themselves of it, that in the choice of a Moderator, who happened to be a Tory, there appeared about twenty-six or twenty-seven more Tory than Whig voters.

Secondly, that contrary to our minds, the Selectmen and others, inhabitants of this Town, have petitioned his Excellency, agreeable to a late Parliament Act, for leave to hold a meeting here (a thing so contrary to the general sense of the people in this Province) without the knowledge or advice of many in this Town.

Thirdly, That the vote which passed in the negative, whether the Town will adhere to, and abide by the Resolves of the Continental and Provincial Congresses, or any illegal assemblies whatsoever, we think was craftily drawn, and put as if these Congresses were illegal, when we suppose the present situation of our publick affairs makes them both legal and necessary.

Fourthly, That the Town voted thanks should be returned to General Gage and Admiral Graves, for their ready and kind interposition, assistance and protection, from further insults and abuses, with which we are continually threatened, when we do not know or believe that any of the inhabitants of this Town are threatened with insults and abuses.

Lastly, That the Selectmen gave but a single day’s warning for the said Meeting; ordered it to be held in a part of the Town where a Town Meeting was never before had, and that information was not given in the notification of the design of said Meeting.

In sum, those men wrote, the system had been rigged. Patriot newspapers made sure that protest got out to the public. However, it didn’t have the legal weight of the town meeting’s resolutions and communications. Marshfield remained the only Loyalist bastion of Massachusetts outside of Boston.

TOMORROW: London takes notice.

Marshfield Town Meeting “penetrated with the highest sense of gratitude”

In February 1775 Marshfield’s Loyalist community was feeling emboldened by the presence of a hundred British regulars, and perhaps upset by the complaints from neighboring towns about those troops.

At that time, local historian Lysander Salmon Richards later wrote, Marshfield had only three selectmen: Dr. Isaac Winslow, Abijah White, and Ephraim Little. And they were all in the Loyalist camp.

Thus, those men could call an official town meeting on the terms they chose. Which started with applying to Gen. Thomas Gage for permission to hold such a meeting. The Massachusetts Government Act had forbidden towns from meeting more than once a year without the royal governor’s approval, which was a big strike at local self-government and thus a big grievance for the Patriot side.

According to Boston businessman Harbottle Dorr, Marshfield was the first town to approach the governor under the new law. Most towns were either claiming to meet by adjournment from a previous session or just gathering without official sanction.

Marshfield’s meeting took place on 20 February. The attendees chose Dr. Winslow to moderate. The records of that meeting say:

A vote was put to know the mind of the Town, whether they will adhere to, and abide by the Resolves and Recommendations of the Continental and Provincial Congresses, or any illegal assemblies whatsoever? and it passed in the negative.

Secondly, The vote was put to know the mind of the Town, whether they will return their thanks to General Gage, and Admiral [Samuel] Graves, for their ready and kind interposition, assistance, and protection from further insults and abuses with which we are continually threatened? and it passed in the affirmative.

Thirdly, They voted that a Committee be chosen to draw up and send the same to General Gage, and Admiral Graves, said Committee consisting of 23 persons.

Dr. Winslow chaired that large committee and probably drafted the addresses in the home he had recently inherited. (That home is shown above; now the 1699 Winslow House, I’m speaking there this evening.) Marshfield’s address to Gen. Gage matches the neighboring towns’ complaint in its high-flying rhetoric:

We, the Inhabitants of Marshfield, in legal Town Meeting assembled, this 20th day of February, 1775, beg leave to return your Excellency our most grateful acknowledgments for your seasonable assistance and protection, in sending a detachment of his Majesty’s Troops to secure and defend the loyal people of this Town, from the threats and violence of an infatuated and misguided people. We assure your Excellency (whatever may have been surmised to the contrary) that there were sufficient ground and reasons for making application; and we are fully convinced that this movement has preserved and promoted, not only the peace and tranquillity of this Town in particular, but of the County in general; owing, in great degree, to the prudence, firmness, and good conduct of Captain [Nisbet] Balfour, who, with pleasure as well as justice we say it, has done every thing in his power to obtain those laudable ends and purposes.

Thankfully we acknowledge our obligations to our Sovereign, for his great goodness and wisdom, in placing at the head of affairs, in this Province, in this day of difficulty, confusion, and discord, a gentleman of your Excellency’s well known humanity, moderation, capacity and intrepidity, and shall constantly implore the Supreme Governour of the universe to assist and direct you in the faithful discharge of the various functions of your exalted station, with fidelity to your King, with honour to yourself, and with happiness to the people committed to your charge.

With pleasure we embrace this opportunity of expressing our detestation and abhorrence of all assemblies and combinations of men (by whatever specious name they may call themselves) who have or shall rebelliously attempt to alter or oppose the wise Constitution and Government of Great Britain.

Furthermore, we beg leave to inform your Excellency, that in the most critical and dangerous times, we have always manifested and preserved our loyalty to the King, and obedience to his laws; carefully avoided all constitutional covenants and engagements whatsoever, that might warp us from our duty to our God, our King, and country; and as we are determined to persevere in the same course, we flatter ourselves that our endeavours and exertions will meet with our most gracious Sovereign’s approbation, as well as your Excellency’s, and that under his and your gentle and humane government and kind protection, we may peaceably and quietly sit under our own vines and fig-trees, and have none to molest or make us afraid.

(Fans of Hamilton will recall how George Washington also liked to quote Micah 4:4.)

The address to Adm. Graves was shorter but similar in tone:

We, the Inhabitants of Marshfield, in Town Meeting legally assembled, the 20th of February, A.D. 1775, penetrated with the highest sense of gratitude, present our sincere and hearty thanks to you sir, for your ready compliance with a request of a number of our inhabitants, in ordering an armed Vessel to protect and defend us from the lawless insults and abuses with which we were threatened by numbers of seditious and evil-minded people, for no other reason (that we can conceive) but our loyalty to the best of Kings, and firm adherence to the laws of Government. With hearts replete with gratitude, we contemplate the paternal care and goodness of our most gracious Sovereign, in the appointment of a gentlemen to command his Navy in America, at this critical juncture, whose duty, inclination, and abilities, so happily coincide to answer the good purposes of his department.

Permit us to acquaint your Honour, that we have always endeavoured to comport ourselves, and regulate our conduct agreeable to the laws of England and this country; that we have not been guilty of any riots or illegal assemblies, or adopted or subscribed any unconstitutional resolves, covenants, or combinations whatsoever, but have constantly and uniformly borne, our testimony against such measures and proceedings; that it is our serious intention and firm resolution to respect the English Constitution; and demean ourselves like true, loyal and obedient subjects, by doing which we apprehend we shall entitle ourselves to the continued protection of our most gracious King, your Honour, and every friend to peace and good Government.

Dr. Winslow and his Loyalist colleagues weren’t the only men at that meeting, however. Marshfield’s longtime town clerk, Nehemiah Thomas, also attended to keep the official record. And he surely didn’t like what was going on.

TOMORROW: The Patriot party objects.