Newton Prince: London pensioner

A while back I promised to complete the story of Newton Prince, a black businessman in Boston—at least as much as I’ve been able to find out. My earlier entries on him:

• In 1770, he witnessed the Boston Massacre, and later was a defense witness in the trials of Capt. Thomas Preston and the soldiers.
• In 1773, he presented the petition of enslaved men seeking an end to slavery to members of the Massachusetts General Court.

In his personal life, Prince married Phillis Binn, a free black woman, on 26 March 1767. The Rev. Dr. Joseph Sewall married them in the Old South Meeting-House, where Prince was a member.

Gilbert Deblois, a prominent merchant and part-owner of the building called Concert Hall, wrote on 10 Mar 1781:

Mr. Newton Prince & his Wife, where [sic] for many Years, Inhabitants of Boston, New England, and Supported themselves there with Reputation in the Pastrycook branch by attending & Cooking at most of the Public Entertainments &c.

Prince himself wrote that “during a series of Years [he] supported himself & family in a decent & comfortable way.”

In his new book Rough Crossings, Simon Schama presents Prince as a contrast to Crispus Attucks, now often celebrated as an American hero:

But the story of Newton Prince, the black barber who testified on behalf of the redcoats is, unsurprisingly, much less well known. For his temerity, Prince was tarred and feathered by infuriated Patriots, so naturally in 1776 he opted for General Howe and as evacuated with the British.

I think Schama’s in error. And not just because Prince wasn’t a barber. (That was a common profession for black men.) I suspect Schama read too much into what Newton Prince told the British government in September 1780.

At that time, Prince was applying for financial support from the Crown as a Loyalist. That process required presenting evidence that one had been loyal to the royal government before and during the Revolutionary War, and suffered for that loyalty. Prince described himself as having been

a principle Evidence on behalf of the Crown, wherein Captn. Preston of the 29th: Regmts of Foot was plantiffe [actually, defendant]; the Inhabitants, (such as were not attach’d to Government) deserted him, & Enter’d into associations, to utterly destroy him, by Tarring & Feathering him, a mode of punishment peculiar to themselves.

[This quotation and the one from Deblois above come from Prince's file at the British National Archives/PRO: Audit Office 13/75, 282-7.]

I suspect Schama or his researchers saw that passage and interpreted it to mean that a mob had actually tarred and feathered Prince. But I think crowds threatened Prince, along with other people they perceived as working-class servants of the royal government. I have three reasons for my conclusion:

• Prince doesn't actually describe suffering a physical attack, as other tar-and-feathers victims did.
  
• His character witnesses, including Deblois and Sir William Pepperell, Bart., don't describe him as suffering such an attack, either.
• Tar-and-feathering was a public punishment. Crown officials and even newspapers took notice of it, but there's no documentation of such an attack on a black man in Boston.

Prince instead emphasized his economic losses from leaving Boston: his shop, his stock, and the value of debts that he’d never be able to collect. In March 1776, the Prince family had gone to Halifax, along with the rest of Boston’s evacuees. There Newton supported himself by working for Deblois, probably as a cook or other house servant.

Later the Princes sailed to London. By the early 1780s, Prince was running a coal and chandler’s shop in the capital of the British Empire. (The word “chandler” can mean either "candlemaker" or "retailer of provisions and supplies," usually for ships. Prince was probably the latter.)

His wife was in poor health in 1783 when he applied for temporary assistance—though again, he might have emphasized that detail to bolster his need for assistance. This wife may have been Phillis, or he may have remarried; the file does not state her given name.

The Loyalists Commission granted Newton Prince an annual pension of £10. Not a large amount, as those grants went, but a steady supplemental income for a working man. According to Alfred Jones’s The Loyalists of Massachusetts, Prince collected his pension until he died in 1819.

Newton Prince: Massacre witness

Newton Prince was among the most valuable witnesses for the defense in the trials that followed the shootings on 5 March 1770, called the "Boston Massacre." Prince was a businessman in the North End of Boston. He was also unusual in being a black businessman with his own shop. Sources from a few years' apart label him a pastry-cook and a "lemon merchant." In any case, he was definitely not enslaved.

Trial notes by special prosecutor Robert Treat Paine and someone working for Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, along with Prince's own later petitions to the government, preserve some more details. He identified himself as a member of the “South Church”—probably the very large Old South Meeting. Paine apparently wrote down that Prince was from the West Indies, but a 1781 document in the British National Archives says he was “a native of Boston in America.” He was born in 1733, making him about thirty-seven years old in the year of the Massacre.

Prince testified in the two separate trials of Capt. Thomas Preston and the British soldiers under him. The anonymous notes on his evidence at Preston's trial can be found on this page. Here's what Newton Prince had to say at the soldiers' trial, taken down by a shorthand expert, John Hodgson, working for Loyalist printer John Fleeming. (Paragraph breaks added for easier web reading.)

When the bells rung I was at my own house, I run to the door and heard the cry of fire, I put on my shoes, and went out, and met two or three men, asked where the fire was; they said it was something better than fire.

I met some with clubs, some with buckets and bags, and some running before me with sticks in their hands; I went to the Town-house, looked down the street, and saw the soldiers come out with their guns and bayonets fixed: I saw Capt. Preston with them; there were a number of people by the west door of the Town-house, they said lets go and attack the Main Guard, some said for God’s sake do not meddle with them; they said by God we will go, others again said do not go.

After a while they huzzaed and went down King-street; there was a number of people came down Prison-lane, and some from the Post-office; they went down to the Custom house, and I went down.

The soldiers were all placed round in a circle with their guns breast high. I stood on the right wing, when the Captain came the people crouded in on him to speak to him, and I went behind them, I went next to the Custom-house door, there were people all round the soldiers.

Q. How near were the people to the soldiers?

A. About three or four feet from the point of their bayonets, the thickest part was by Capt. Preston. When I got to the corner I saw people with sticks striking on their guns at the right wing. I apprehended danger and that the guns might go off accidentally. I went to get to the upper end towards the Town house, I had not got to the center of the party, before the guns went off; as they went off I run, and did not stop till I got to the upper end of the Town-house.

Q. How many did you see strike upon their guns?

A. I cannot tell how many of them did it.

Q. Did you hear at that time they were striking, the cry of fire, fire?

A. Yes, they said fire, fire damn you fire, fire you lobsters, fire, you dare not fire.

Q. Did you see any thing thrown at the soldiers?

A. Nothing but snow balls, flung by some youngsters.

My earlier posting on Newton Prince catches him three years later, lobbying a legislator for civil rights. Sooner or later I'll post on what happened to him during and after the war.

Newton Prince: civil rights lobbyist

I plan to pay my first visit to the New-York Historical Society today, so it seems appropriate to post about a document there which reveals a bit about lobbying for civil rights in Boston just before the Revolution.

The NYHS owns a leaflet reprinting a letter datelined "Boston, April 20th, 1773," and signed by four men who identify themselves as slaves: Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook, and Chester Joie. They ask for their liberty, in the same spirit that the province was then demanding political liberties from the Crown. According to their letter, after becoming free those four men planned

to leave the province, which we determine to do as soon as we can, from our joynt labours procure money to transport ourselves to some part of the Coast of Africa, where we propose a settlement.

The printed leaflet was part of a legislative lobbying effort, as shown by the address line printed on it: "For the Representative of the town of". The town name "Thompson" was written in by hand on the NYHS copy. Presumably there was one leaflet prepared for every sympathetic lawmaker.

Who delivered these leaflets on behalf of the four slaves, who had neither the liberty nor the standing to speak for themselves? More than twenty years later, a former member of the Massachusetts legislature's upper house recalled being approached by a free black businessman with a pamphlet. Samuel Dexter, former Council member from Weston, wrote to the Rev Jeremy Belknap on 26 Feb 1795:

I took up a pamphlet which I had not looked into for several years, and found I had noted upon the outside leaf that it was given to me by Mr. Newton Prince, lemon merchant, in the name and at the desire of a number of negroes, then petitioners to the General Court. At the head of these was Foelix Holbrook.

While the petition remained undecided upon, I was called out of the Council Chamber, and very politely presented with the pamphlet by Newton, who, after making his best bow, said that the negroes had been informed that I was against the slave-trade, and was their friend. He had several more to give to particular members of the House of Representatives. Upon my returning into the chamber, I boasted, as I have since, that I was distinguished from all the other members of council by this mark of respect.

What was the outcome of Newton Prince's effort? This Massachusetts legislature voted to prohibit the slave trade from Africa, but did nothing to end slavery within the province. And then the royal governor vetoed the law against importing new slaves, anyway. Slavery did not end in Massachusetts until the high court decided in 1783 that such inequality went against the state constitution (the same basis for the court's 2003 marriage-equality decision).

And what happened to Newton Prince? I'll discuss his past and future in future posts.