How Salem Welcomed William Molineux

Yesterday I described how on 31 July 1770 the “Body of the Trade and Inhabitants” of Boston authorized a committee of five men to go to Salem and other towns in Essex County to urge their business communities to stick to the non-importation agreement.

The committee—or, as it turned out, four of the five—traveled north the next day. On 7 August those men were back at the public meeting in Boston, reporting that their discussions had gone very well.

But that wasn’t the full story. On 20 August the Boston Gazette ran a dispatch from Salem that indicated there had been some anxious moments:

…four respectable Gentlemen; being Part of the Boston Standing Committee, came to this Town on the 1st Instant [i.e., of this month], and put up at the King’s Arms.

Late in the Evening, William Luscomb, of this Place, entered the House, and enquired for Mr. [William] Molineux, &c. and being told that the Gentlemen had retired to Bed, he searched for and found their Apartment, and being admitted, represented to them, in hideous Colours, 30 or 40 People were assembled at the Long-Wharf, had agreed to beset them at one o’Clock, tar and feather them, &c. unless they immediately departed the Town.—

After this Information, Luscomb went away: Directly after a Letter was found in the Entry, conceived in the following base and insolent Terms, viz.——

“General Molineaux

Understanding yt. You are come into this Town (who are at present in a peaceable State) to Raise a Spirit of Sedition; As a Friend to Mankind in general, I would Advise you immediately to depart this Place, with all those that have enlisted under your Piraticle Banners, otherwise. Be assurd You will suffer the like Fate, with the poor Mc.Masters whom you treated with such Unparrallell’d Barbarity

Two hours are only allow’d You to Consider of this matter, and You are Surrounded with Spys to know the Effect.

Philanthrop

P S, Removing Your Logings can’t possibley secreet You

Salem 12 oClock”

As the Gentlemen were Strangers in the Town, they sent, as well for their own Satisfaction, as to quiet the Family where they put up, to a Gentleman near by, who was one of the Committee for this Town, to know whether he could account for this odd Adventure: He came, and assured them, as his Opinion, that there was no Foundation for what had been told them, and that they and the Family might rest perfectly easy.—

The Gentlemen having the next Day conferred with our Committee on the Business they came upon, and receiving Satisfaction, went out of Town, well assured, we doubt not, that this Town will steadily adhere to the Measures now pursuing for the common Good of America.

The Selectmen of the Town have preferred repeated Complaints to one or more Justices of the Peace against the said William Luscomb, praying that a Warrant might be issued for apprehending him, that he may answer for this Conduct as the law directs; but their Endeavours, it is said, has not yet proved successful. Mr. [William] Goodhue, Keeper of the King’s-Arms Tavern, has also exhibited a Complaint for the same Purpose.

In his copy of the Boston Gazette, Harbottle Dorr noted that the four Bostonians who made the trip to Salem were Molineux, William Phillips, William Cooper, and William Greenleaf. The innkeeper and the man apparently making threats were also named William. I hold out hope that the Salem committee-man had the same first name.

I’ve found out little about William Luscomb. There was a line of craftsmen in Salem with that name. This one was probably the housewright (1717-1783), which would make him fifty-three years old in 1770. But it’s possible he was that man’s namesake son (1747-1827), a housewright and later painter, or a cousin of that line.

Both William Luscombs, father and son, contributed to the building of a new Congregationalist meetinghouse in 1772, so they weren’t Anglican. There’s no evidence they were importers and wanted to break up the boycott for business reasons.

This William Luscomb had obviously heard about how a Boston crowd had attacked Patrick McMaster and threatened to tar and feather him in June. He blamed Molineux, known for leading the Boston crowds but not publicly implicated in that incident. But there’s no sign of any close tie between the Luscombs and the McMaster brothers.

So it’s possible that this William Luscomb just didn’t like the thought of a Boston merchant coming north and leaning on locals with his big-town ways. Ironically, the people of Essex County had used tar and feathers to punish Customs officers a couple of years before the practice came to Boston.

Trouble for Henry Barnes, “an Infamous importer”

Yesterday I started to describe how the town of Marlborough started to pressure Henry Barnes (shown here, in a portrait by his former slave Prince Demah) to stop importing goods from Britain.

The men of Marlborough adopted some of the same measures as the non-importation activists in Boston, just a year or more later. They held a town meeting to formally condemn importers. They appointed a committee to inspect goods and customers. They even called a meeting that didn’t have a property requirement so more young men could participate. And some folks started to make their disapproval even clearer by damaging Barnes’s property.

Henry Barnes’s wife Christian heard rumors that this activity was being guided from Boston:

It is said that a young gentleman who has formilly headed the mob in Boston and now resides with us is the perpetrator of all this mischief, but I will not believe it until I have further profe.

Alas, I haven’t found a clue about which young gentleman that might be.

In her letter to her friend Elizabeth Smith, Christian Barnes described how Bostonians themselves had attacked her husband’s property while it was in transport:

The greatest loss we have as yet met with was by a Mob in Boston who a few Nights ago atack’d a wagon load of goods which belongs to us they abused the Driver and cut a Bag of Peppur which contain’d three hundred [pounds?] leting it all into the street then gather’d it up in their Hand’fs & Hatts and caried it off the rest of the load they ordered back into the Publick Store of which the well disposed Commity Keeps the Key

Mr. Barnes has apply’d to the Lefnt. Govener [Thomas Hutchinson] for advice and he advised him to put in a petition to the General Court he then repaired to Mr. [James] Murray [a justice of the peace who was also Smith’s brother] and beg’d his assistance in the drawing of it up he complyed with his request and it is lade before the House next week, as I have entered so largly into the affair I will send you a Coppy of the Petition, we expect no Satisfaction or redress from the General Court but only as it is a legal Method and praparatory (in case of further insults) to the appealing to Higher Powers

You would be pleased to see with what moderation Mr. Barnes behaves in his present distresses at the same time I am well assured his resolution will carry him through all difficultys without swerving from his first principles

The Merchants in Boston are now intirely out of the question in all debates at their Town Meeting, which is caried on by a mob of the lowest sort of people leaded by one [John] Balard and Doct. [Thomas] Young Persons that I never before heard off

Dr. Thomas Young had led a crowd to the McMaster brothers’ store in early June to press them to stop importing. After another crowd carted Patrick McMaster around with a tar barrel on 19 June, John Ballard administered the oath by which the Scotsman swore not to return to Boston. Barnes heard from either Ame or Elizabeth Cumings that “the other two [McMaster] brothers had fled for their lives” as well.

And the people of Marlborough were still ramping up pressure on Henry Barnes. His wife wrote:

on the 10 of June the unqualified Voters had a meeting and enter’d into the same resolves the others had done before and the next day an Effigy was Hung upon a Hill in sight of the House with a paper Pin’d to the Breast, wheron was wrote Henry Barnes an Infamous importer this Hung up all Day and at Night they Burn’d it

In the five years since the Stamp Act, only the society’s worst political enemies had the honor of being hanged and burned in effigy.

COMING UP: Another effigy, this one on horseback.

Attack on the Hulton House

On 19 June 1770, 250 years ago today, political violence broke out again in greater Boston.

With the 14th Regiment off at Castle William, royal officials were already feeling exposed. Acting governor Thomas Hutchinson had moved the Massachusetts General Court to Cambridge, and he and many Customs officers were staying out of town.

Meanwhile, the non-importation movement was facing its own challenge. Since Parliament had repealed most of the Townshend duties (retaining only the most lucrative, on tea), popular support for their boycott was waning. Why couldn’t the American Whigs accept a partial victory?

One reason was that their ideology said any compromise with oppression would lead to political slavery. Another was that no large town wanted to be seen as the first to return to normal trade. The merchants of New York and Philadelphia held large meetings and issued broadsides. Boston’s Whig leaders kept up the pressure on the few local merchants already identified as importing goods.

On 1 June, Dr. Thomas Young led supporters to the shop of the McMaster brothers, merchants from Scotland doing business in Boston and Portsmouth. On the 19th, a crowd returned and seized Patrick McMaster, threatening to tar and feather him. I wrote about that event back here with help from an article by Prof. Colin Nicholson.

Here’s Customs Commissioner Henry Hulton’s later description of what happened to McMaster, as published by Neil Longley York and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts:

On the 19th June one Mr. McMaster, a Scotch Merchant and Importer, was taken out of his room, placed in a Cart and made to expect the same treatment that [Owen] Richards had experienced; but fainting away from an apprehension of what was to befall him, they spared him this ignimony, and contented themselves with leading him through the town in the Cart to Roxbury, where they turned him out, spiting upon him, and otherwise contemptuously and rudely treating him.

This is a rare documented pre-Revolutionary example of New Englanders tarring and feathering someone not employed by the Customs Service. McMaster was probably also genteel while most early victims of those attacks were working-class. But since he was a newcomer to Boston and a Scotsman besides, the crowd could conceive of tarring him—until he fainted.

Hulton himself had rented an estate in rural Brookline (shown above, courtesy of Digital Commonwealth) for his family, including his sister Ann. On 25 July she wrote to a friend about what the Hultons experienced later that same night, possibly from the same crowd:

I have often thought of what you said, that surely we did not live in a lone House. It’s true we have long been in a dangerous situation, from the State of Government. The want of protection, the perversion of the Laws, and the spirit of the People inflamed by designing men.

Yet our house in the Country has been a place of retreat for many from the disturbances of the Town, and though they were become very alarming, yet we did not apprehend an immediate attack on our House, or that a Mob out of Boston should come so far, before we had notice of it, and were fully persuaded there are Persons more obnoxious than my Brother, that he had no personal Enemy, and confident of the good will of our Neighbours (in the Township we live in) towards him, so that we had no suspicion of what happened the night of June the 19th—we have reason to believe it was not the sudden outrage of a frantic Mob, but a plot artfully contrived to decoy My Brother into the hands of assassins. At Midnight when the Family was asleep, had not a merciful Providence prevented their designs, we had been a distressd Family indeed.

Between 12 and 1 o’Clock he was wakened by a knocking at the Door. He got up, enquired the person’s name and business, who said he had a letter to deliver to him, which came Express from New York. My Brother puts on his Cloaths, takes his drawn Sword in one hand, and opened the Parlor window with the other. The Man asked for a Lodging—said he, I’ll not open my door, but give me the letter. The man then put his hand, attempting to push up the window, upon which my Brother hastily clapped it down.

Instantly with a bludgeon several violent blows were struck which broke the Sash, Glass and frame to pieces. The first blow aimed at my Brother’s Head, he Providentialy escaped, by its resting on the middle frame, being double, at same time (though before then, no noise or appearance of more Persons than one) the lower windows, all round the House (excepting two) were broke in like manner. My Brother stood in amazement for a Minute or 2, and having no doubt that a number of Men had broke in on several sides of the House, he retired Upstairs.

You will believe the whole Family was soon alarmed, but the horrible Noises from without, and the terrible shrieks within the House from Mrs. H. and Servants, which struck my Ears on awaking, I can’t describe, and shall never forget.

Ann Hulton’s letter is also available from the Colonial Society and was first published in 1927 in Letters of a Loyalist Lady.

TOMORROW: Aftermath in Brookline.

“Voted to proceed to the Business of the Meeting”

On 23 Jan 1770, as described yesterday, the Bostonians meeting about non-importation in Faneuil Hall received a letter from acting governor Thomas Hutchinson declaring their gathering to be illegal and ordering them to disperse.

In response, those men “unanimously voted to proceed to the Business of the Meeting.” Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf asked moderator William Phillips for a written message to take back to the governor. The meeting came up with this note, addressed to the sheriff:

It is the unanimous Desire of this Body, that you inform his Honor the Lieutenant-Governor, that his Address to this Body has been read and attended to, with all that Deference and Solemnity which the Message and the Times demand; and it is the unanimous Opinion of this Body, after serious Consideration and Debate, that this Meeting is warranted by Law: And they desire you to inform his Honor, that they had determined to keep Consciences void of just Offence towards God and towards Man.

In Smugglers and Patriots, John W. Tyler stated that letter was written in the fine hand of John Hancock (shown above). The previous week, he shied from leading a crowd to the governor’s house. Now Hancock was ready to stand at the front of the movement.

Before leaving, Greenleaf made sure to tell the people he wanted “to be considered in the Light only of the Bearer of his Honor’s Letter.” In other words, Hutchinson stood alone, his show of authority ending in a resounding defeat.

The “Body of the Trade” then proceeded through a series of votes. In response to accusations that someone had tried to burn down the store of importer William Jackson, the meeting offered a £100 reward for the arsonist. A further resolution suggested that an enemy of the community—Harbottle Dorr suggested it was Jackson himself—had planted the evidence of that crime.

Another resolution asked people “totally to abstain from the use of Tea upon any pretence whatever” since tea accounted for “the greatest Part of the Revenue” from the Townshend duties.

But the main business of the meeting was about naming and shaming the shopkeepers who were still defying the non-importation committee.

The first group was the merchants Jackson, Theophilus Lillie, John Taylor, and Nathaniel Rogers. The meeting deemed them “obstinate and inveterate Enemies of their Country, and Subverters of the Rights and Liberties of this Continent.” It declared that people should respond by “withholding not only all commercial Dealing; but every Act and Office of common Civility” from them. The resolution went on for a long time. You can read it here in the Boston Gazette.

Then the meeting turned to a second group of defiant businesspeople:

• John Bernard, a grown son of the departed governor, Francis Bernard.
• James and Patrick McMaster, brothers from Scotland who had set up as “factors,” or wholesalers, in Boston.
• Ame and Elizabeth Cumings, sisters from Concord who had opened a shop to support themselves; their late parents had also come from Scotland.
• John Mein, printer from Scotland, still in hiding at Castle William after a fight with merchants back in October.

Most of those people were “strangers in this Country,” the meeting declared. They had “in the most insolent manner too long affronted this people, and endeavoured to undermine the liberties of this country.” Invoking Biblical language (Isaiah 51:1), the gathering declared “that they deserve to be driven into that obscurity, from which they originated, and to the hole of the pit from whence they were digged.”

The next day, Lt. Gov. Hutchinson wrote to Lord Hillsborough, the Secretary of State, about his attempt to stop the meeting. He said he’d spoken with Phillips, his Council, and the town’s justices of the peace about how such meetings would lead to “high treason,” but no one had agreed with him. He acknowledged his letter had failed to disperse the crowd. But Hutchinson insisted that “it made them more anxious to restrain all disorders.”

In the coming weeks, we’ll see how that worked out.

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.

The Attack on Patrick McMaster

I’ve been meaning to mention Colin Nicolson’s article “A Plan to ‘banish all the Scotchmen’: Victimization and Political Mobilization in Pre-Revolutionary Boston” since I got the 2007 issue of the Massachusetts Historical Review last fall. (Some older articles from this periodical are available online, but not the latest.)

This article focuses on the suffering of Patrick McMaster, a merchant born in Galloway in 1741 who came to Boston in 1767 and lived to regret it. Here’s a capsule history of the man, in notes about his claim to the British government’s Loyalists Commission on 26 Dec 1785:

He is a Partner in the House of James & Patrick McMaster & Co., which consisted of the three Brothers... [the third being John].

They are all natives of Scotland & went to America before 1768, and at the commencement of the troubles they carried on Trade at Boston & Portsmouth. John left America in 1772, & has remained in London ever since.

In 1770 the Witness was seized by the Mob and carted through the streets of Boston, at that time the mob forced him to take an oath that he should not return to Boston—the cause of his treatment was that the House imported British Goods.

He took shelter with the 14th Regt. at Castle William.

In 1775 the Witness was settled at Boston, John was settled at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They were both uniformly attached to Great Britain & Patrick was enrolled in the North British Association at Boston.

He quitted Boston at the Evacuation—he has been carrying on trade within the British lines & at home ever since—he is now settled in Halifax as a Mercht.

The assault on McMaster in 1770 was a unique event in that turbulent period: he ended up nearly being tarred and feathered.

On 1 June, Dr. Thomas Young led a crowd of “hundreds of Men and Boys” to the McMasters’ shop and ordered them out of town by six o’clock on the 4th. Ever since the previous fall, the brothers had been defying the Boston Whigs’ “nonimportation” (or boycott) of British goods. They were relatively recent arrivals to town, and they were Scottish. Since March, after the Boston Massacre, there were no soldiers patrolling the town, and in May a mob led by a New London ship’s captain had tarred and feathered a Customs officer named Owen Richards.

The McMasters apparently communicated to Whig leaders that they were willing to compromise, and stayed in town. But on 19 June, a mob appeared at their shop (apparently without Dr. Young) and tore down their sign. Patrick was the only one home, so the people dragged him out and put him into a cart with a barrel of pine tar. As he was rolled around Boston, McMaster fainted, prompting a stop at an apothecary shop. According to Customs Commissioner Henry Hulton:

[McMaster] fainting away from apprehension of what was to befall him, they spared him this ignimony, and contented themselves with leading him thro’ the town in the Cart to Roxbury, where they turned him out, spiting upon him, & otherwise contemptuously & rudely treating him.

The merchant promised not to return to Boston. (That evening, a mob attacked Hulton’s home in Brookline.)

The fact that McMaster had fainted was clearly one factor in the mob’s leniency. He probably also benefited from deference to his class as a gentleman (most victims of such attacks were working-class). Furthermore, he may not have seemed like quite the right target for tar and feathers. Almost all the other victims of such attacks in Massachusetts were low- and mid-level employees of the Customs service. The McMasters had no connection to that branch of the Treasury.

McMaster wrote an account of his ordeal, dated 27 June 1770, which Nicolson reprints with his article. The merchant named three men among his attackers. One was John Ballard, who administered the oath in which the Scotsman swore not to come back to Boston. Ballard also ran a wharf that the McMaster brothers used for unloading their goods from Britain; his motivation for treating a customer this way is unclear.

Another assailant McMaster named was “Eliga Story.” Could that have been Dr. Elisha Story? It seems unusual for a genteel doctor to have been part a tar-and-feathers mob. Then again, McMaster might not have named Story as one of the mob’s leaders, merely as one of the few faces he’d recognized.

Dr. Story was born in 1743 to William Story, a local Customs official whose own house was mildly mobbed during the Stamp Act protests of 1765; after William’s career in the royal bureaucracy stalled, he retired to Ipswich and became a firm Whig. Dr. Story was also a son-in-law of John Ruddock, the “big man” of the North End. The doctor participated in the North End Caucus and helped to patrol the docks to ensure the East India Company tea would not be landed. I’ve seen his appointments book at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and he cleared his schedule in the week leading up to the Boston Tea Party. A few months after that event, Dr. Story moved to Marblehead, where he remained until his death in 1805.

As for Patrick McMaster’s fate after the war, Beamish Murdoch’s A History of Nova Scotia states:

About christmas, 1797, a small schooner was lost on the bay of Fundy shores, near Wilmot. Three mutilated dead bodies were found on the bank, and three others who had been frozen to death in the woods after escaping from the water. Mr. Patrick McMaster, a merchant of Halifax, was one of the three who had been drowned...

(I put that last bit in partly so I could include the name “Beamish Murdoch.”)