Legal Trouble in Pembroke

Back on Thanksgiving, I mentioned that the Rev. Kilborn Whitman (1765-1835, shown here) delivered the holiday sermon in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1798.

I also noted that Whitman decided not to get involved in the Quincy Congregationalist meeting’s feuding factions and became a lawyer in Pembroke instead.

While looking into Whitman I came across this posting from the Hanson Historical Society, based on research by Mary Blauss Edwards. Until 1820, Hanson was the western parish of Pembroke.

The posting details the troubles that the couple John London Kelley and Susannah Prince ran into in 1804 after they started to farm land in Pembroke rented from Whitman. Kelley and Prince both had African and Native ancestry, so that while they had grown up in the town they were living on its margins.

This is how the troubles began:

One cold night in January 1805, an acquaintance, Benjamin Bates of Hanover, appeared at their door. Bates had overdue debts and had recently heard about a job opportunity to work as a sailor aboard a ship. Bates perhaps drunkenly heard about the job at a Pembroke or Hanover tavern, because he apparently did not inform any relatives or friends about his sudden money-making intentions.

Benjamin Bates was welcomed into John London Kelley and Susannah Prince’s home, where Bates asked to exchange some of his old clothes for food to take on his journey, then immeditately left for Plymouth or Boston port. Within several days, Bates’ friends began to speculate where he was, and rumors began to circulate throughout Pembroke and Hanover.

It quickly became apparent that Benjamin Bates had last been seen at the Kelleys’ home on the “evening of his departure.” The Kelleys later reported that “suspicions were excited against [us], that [we] had murdered the said Bates and concealed his death; popular prejudice being excited against us, it was but a short period before we began to experience some of its distressing effects.”

Kelley and Prince were jailed on suspicion of murder, then released because of lack of evidence—only to find that Whitman had rented the farm to another man. (Also a person of color.)

To forestall the couple’s complaints, or perhaps to drive them out of town, Whitman then filed suit against them for not paying rent while they were in jail. He won the case, forcing Kelley into financial default.

But the story wasn’t over. Visit the Hanson Historical Society page to read more.

Abigail Adams’s Quiet Thanksgiving in 1798

On 29 Nov 1798, Abigail Adams sat down to an unusually small Thanksgiving dinner.

An autumn Thanksgiving feast was an important tradition in New England, and in October Massachusetts’s governor, Increase Sumner, issued a proclamation naming the date for that year.

But that holiday applied only within the state, not nationally. John Adams had gone back to work as President in Philadelphia.

Furthermore, all of Abigail and John’s children were also away from Quincy. Nabby Smith was with her husband and children in New York, as was Charles Adams with his wife and children. (Those spouses were also siblings, by the way.) John Quincy Adams was serving his father and country as minister to Russia, and he had taken baby brother Thomas Boylston Adams along as his secretary.

Abigail was thus facing an empty nest. She wrote to John:

This is our Thanksgiving day. when I look Back upon the year past, I perceive many, very many causes for thanksgiving, both of a publick and Private nature. I hope my Heart is not ungratefull, tho sad; it is usually a day of festivity when the social Family circle meet together tho seperated the rest of the year.

No Husband dignifies my Board, no Children add gladness to it, no Smiling Grandchildren Eyes to sparkle for the plumb pudding, or feast upon the mincd Pye. Solitary & alone I behold the day after a sleepless night, without a joyous feeling. am I ungratefull? I hope not.

Brother [Richard] Cranchs illness prevented Him and my sister [Mary] from joining me, & [Peter] Boylston Adams’s sickness confineing him to his House debared me from inviting your Brother & Family. I had but one resource, & that was to invite mr & mrs [David and Lydia] Porter to dine with me; and the two Families to unite in the Kitchin with Pheby the only surviving Parent I have, and thus we shared in the [“]Bounties of providence”

The Porters worked on the Adams estate. Phoebe Abdee had been enslaved to Abigail Adams’s father, the Rev. William Smith of Weymouth. After she became free, Adams hired her to help run the farm as well, but the phrase “the only surviving Parent I have” indicates how much more the woman meant to her. 

A New England Thanksgiving of this time always included a sermon. In the Quincy meetinghouse that was delivered by the Rev. Kilborn Whitman (1765-1835), who had left his pulpit in Pembroke in a disagreement over salary. But Abigail Adams didn’t attend:

I was not well enough to venture to meeting and by that means lost an excellent discourse deliverd by mr Whitman, upon the numerous causes of thankfullness and gratitude which we all have to the Great Giver of every perfect Gift; nor was the late Glorious Victory gained by Admiral Nelson over the French omitted by him, as in its concequences of Great importance in checking the mad arrogance of that devouring Nation.

By this point in her life Adams was quite comfortable talking about politics. Indeed, one senses she missed the oportunity to discuss foreign policy with her family over Thanksgiving dinner.

As for Whitman, the congregation invited him to become the partner and ultimate replacement for the Rev. Anthony Wibird, but the vote wasn’t unanimous and he wisely decided not to stay. Whitman was already studying the law and soon went into that profession instead, back in Pembroke.

“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.

Unboxing Pool Spear

Yesterday I noted the difficulty of finding out more information about a sailor with a common name. Luckily, the next person on George Gailer’s list of people who tarred and feathered him in October 1769 has an unusual name: Pool Spear.

Even with the alternative spelling of Poole, it’s easy to track someone who sounds like a toy the Nerf company sends to families posting “unboxing” reviews on YouTube.

In 1864 the New England Historical and Genealogical Register published a confusing “Spear Family Record.” Fortunately, that article offers enough leads to other records that confirm Pool Spear was born 21 Sept 1735 in Hull.

Pool was the younger son of a captain of a packet ship to Philadelphia who died of smallpox in May 1738, when the boy was three. His older brothers included Joseph, a lighterman; Gershom and David, coopers; Nathan, one of the Bostonians who complained about Capt. John Willson in 1768; and Paul. How the parents decided to have successive boys named Paul and Pool is unclear.

In late 1755 Spear did three months of militia service at Crown Point, New York, in Capt. Thomas Stoddard’s company. The men chose him to be an ensign. Back home, Pool became a tailor. I’ve seen estimates that about one in seven mechanics made clothing in some way during those pre-industrial times.

In May 1761, at the age of twenty-five, Pool Spear married Christiana Turner from Pembroke. The family listed their children as Joseph, Daniel, Oliver, Paul, Christiana, and Abigail. However, I’ve found no published church records to confirm that.

In February 1768, Spear declared bankruptcy, part of the wave kicked up by Nathaniel Wheelwright’s failure three years earlier. He listed as his trustees his brother David Spear, Edward Blanchard, and John Soren. That episode was the only time Spear’s name appeared in the Boston newspapers before the war.

Pool Spear was aged thirty-four during the attack on Gailer in late 1769. The other men I’ve been able to identify were all in their twenties (assuming Daniel Vaughan was the younger of the two candidates). However, that wasn’t the last political disturbance Spear was present for.

TOMORROW: Pool Spear and the Boston Massacre.

A Plymouth County Protest “as if written with a sunbeam”

The letters I quoted yesterday described the arrival of about a hundred British soldiers in Marshfield on 23 Jan 1775, sent by Gen. Thomas Gage to support the local Loyalists. Those letters also reported that Patriots in the region had started to muster against those troops but hung back.

Instead, the nearby communities protested through their civil representatives and some high-flying rhetoric. They sent a letter to the governor that was published in the 27 Feb 1775 Boston Evening-Post:

We, his majesty’s loyal subjects, selectmen of the several towns of Plymouth, Kingston, Duxbury, Pembroke, Hanover, and Scituate, deeply affected with a sense of the increasing dangers and calamities which menace one of the most promising countries upon earth with political excision, cannot but lament, that, while we are endeavoring to preserve peace and maintain the authority of the laws, at a period when the bonds of government are relaxed, by violent infractions on the charter of the province, our enemies are practising every insidious stratagem to seduce the people into acts of violence and outrage.

We beg leave to address your excellency, on a subject which excites our apprehensions extremely: and, in the representation of facts, we promise to pay that sacred regard to truth, which, had our adversaries observed, we flatter ourselves, it would have precluded the necessity of our addressing your excellency, on this occasion.

We are informed, from good authority, that a number of people from Marshfield and Scituate, have made application to your excellency, soliciting the aid of a detachment of his majesty’s troops, for the security and protection of themselves and properties. That their fears and intimidation were entirely groundless, that no design or plan of molestation, was formed against them, or existed but in their own imaginations, their own declarations, and their actions, which have a more striking language, abundantly demonstrate.

Several men of unquestionable veracity, residing in the town of Marshfield, have solemnly called God to witness, before one of his majesty’s justices of the peace, that they not only never heard of any intention to disturb the complainants, but repeatedly saw them after they pretended to be under apprehensions of danger, attending to their private affairs, without arms, and even after they had lodged their arms a few miles from their respective houses. They frequently declared, in conversation with the deponents, that they were not apprehensive of receiving any injury in their persons or properties, and one of them, who is a minor, as many of them are, being persuaded to save his life by adjoining himself to the petitioners, but afterwards abandoning them by the request of his father, deposeth, in like solemn manner, that he was under no intimidation himself, nor did he ever hear any one of them say that he was.

It appears as evident, as if written with a sunbeam, from the general tenor of the testimony, which we are willing to lay before your excellency if desired, that their expressions of fear, were a fallacious pretext, dictated by the inveterate enemies of our constitution, to induce your excellency to send troops into the country, to augment the difficulties of our situation, already very distressing; and, what confirms this truth, if it needs any confirmation, is, the assiduity and pains which we have taken to investigate it. We have industriously scrutinized into the cause of this alarm, and cannot find that it has the least foundation in reality.

All that we have in view in this address is, to lay before your excellency a true state of facts, and to remove that opprobrium, which this movement of the military reflects on this country: and as a spirit of enmity and falsehood is prevalent in the country, and as every thing which comes from a gentleman of your excellency’s exalted station naturally acquires great weight and importance, we earnestly entreat your excellency to search into the grounds of every report, previous to giving your assent to it.

(This transcription was published in the journals of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress with 1800s spellings and punctuation. A contemporaneous printing is preserved in the Harbottle Dorr newspaper collection.)

Those towns also petitioned to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which on 15 February voted:

That the Congress do highly approve of the vigilance and activity of the selectmen and the committees of correspondence of the several towns of Plymouth, Kingston, Duxbury, Pembroke, Hanover, and Scituate, in detecting the falsehoods and malicious artifices of certain persons belonging to Marshfield and Scituate, not respectable either in their numbers or their characters, who are, with great reason, supposed to have been the persons who prevailed upon General Gage to take the imprudent step, of sending a number of the king’s troops into Marshfield, under pretence of protecting them: whereby great and just offence has been given to the good people of this province, as very fatal consequences must have arisen therefrom, if the same malevolent spirit which seems to have influenced them, had actuated the inhabitants of the neighboring towns; or if the same indiscretion which betrayed the general into the unwarrantable measure of sending the troops, had led this people to destroy them.

At this point the Massachusetts Patriots were anxious to deny or play down any reports of violence and intimidation, presenting themselves to the world as peaceful citizens. The Boston Gazette’s first comment on the troops in Marshfield carried a similar message.

No matter that there had indeed been some documented incidents of violence in the Massachusetts countryside. Or that fear of crowds had driven many supporters of the Crown out of their home towns and into Boston. Or that the Provincial Congress was secretly, as I discuss in The Road to Concord, gathering cannon.

TOMORROW: The Marshfield town meeting.

More Upcoming History Seminars

Last week I noted an upcoming session in the Boston Early American History Seminar. The Massachusetts Historical Society sponsors other seminar series that sometimes touch on the period and issues of the American Revolution.

On Thursday, 7 February, at 5:30 P.M. in the series on the History of Women and Gender Jennifer Morgan of New York University will present “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Slave Law and the History of Women in Slavery.” Linda Heywood of Boston University will comment on the paper, and then the discussion will be open to all attendees.

This conversation will take place at the Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge (shown above, courtesy of renovation architects Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates). Morgan’s essay is circulated in advance to subscribers and will be available on paper at the meeting. Afterwards there will be a light buffet supper. To reserve a space, email the M.H.S. seminars office.

The Boston Environmental History Seminar will meet at the M.H.S. on Boylston Street on Tuesday, 12 February, at 5:15 P.M. Ben Cronin of the University of Michigan will share his paper “‘To clear the herring brook’: Fluvial Control, Common Rights, and Commercial Development in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1660-1860.” William F. Hanna III, author of A History of Taunton, Massachusetts, will comment. This paper is described as follows:

By examining towns of Plymouth County, particularly Pembroke and Middleboro, this project shows how political, economic, and at times military power flowed from effective control of the waterways. The shift in what might be called “water regimes” was a crucial location of what Charles Sellers has called the Market Revolution.

Again, the society asks people to email the M.H.S. seminars office to reserve a space so they know how many are coming.

Finally, on Tuesday, 19 February, at 5:15 P.M., the Early American History Seminar has rescheduled a session with Daniel R. Mandell of Truman State University on his paper “Revolutionary Ideologies and Wartime Economic Regulation.” Brendan McConville of Boston University will comment, which should ensure a lively conversation. Again, email the M.H.S. seminars office to reserve a seat at the seminar and supper table.