A Closer Look at the Landscape of Bunker’s Hill

Back in 2017, I shared a map of the Battle of Bunker Hill that Gen. Henry Clinton had drawn himself on the back of some sheet music (permalink).

I wrote:

One eye-catching detail is that Clinton sketched a small fortification on top of Bunker’s Hill . . . There are even lines indicating that one of the warships in the Charles River fired at that site. . . .

evidently on 17 June, Clinton perceived the provincials as having fortified themselves there

This spring Boston 1775 reader Adam Derenne sent an email shedding some light on that mystery:

I believe that Clinton misinterpreted the site — it wasn’t a partial fortification but a gravel pit operated by Charlestown resident Peter Edes.

As Mr. Derenne pointed out, Edes’s gravel pit is mentioned in Charlestown’s 1767 land survey:

Then we measurd a Gravel Pitt Enclos’d & Improv’d by Mr. Peter Edes with his land lying Bounded on the way leading over Bunker’s Hill just opposite to Temple’s Barn. We began about 8 Feet below the easterly part of his Mr. Edes’s Stone Wall, said Wall being on the Way from Temples leading over Bunker’s Hill…

This owner was probably the Peter Edes (1705–1787) whose son Benjamin became a printer of the Boston Gazette (and had a son named Peter).

Mr. Derenne also noted that the City of Boston’s G.I.S. website shows what properties Peter Edes owned in 1775, covering the odd spot in Clinton’s map. Thomas Hyde Page’s map of the battle, published in 1793, showed a blob where Clinton drew that second fortification, presumably the gravel pit.

I then went looking for a mention of this pit in accounts of the battle. Did provincials use it to shelter themselves from the Royal Navy shelling that side of Charlestown? Did British engineers incorporate it into their fortifications on Bunker’s Hill, either the quick barriers made on the evening of 19 April or the sturdy fort built over time after 17 June? But I couldn’t find any account mentioning the gravel pit. So there’s still a mystery to solve.

“Eads escaped out of town last night”

I got interested this week in how printers exited Boston around the start of the war because of a question from a Boston 1775 reader about Benjamin Edes.

The standard understanding of Edes’s departure goes back to the 1901 biography of his son, Peter Edes, Pioneer Printer in Maine. Samuel Lane Boardman wrote:

In the spring of 1775, the town of Boston being in possession of the British troops, Mr. Edes contrived to evade the vigilance of their guards and went to Watertown with an old press and one or two imperfect fonts of type. The escape was made by night in a boat up the Charles river.

We know Edes reestablished the Boston Gazette in Watertown on 5 June 1775, and the shortest distance between Boston and Watertown is indeed up the Charles River.

But Edes’s journey was more complicated than that. Let’s start with a letter from Peter Edes that Boardman reprinted later in his biography, the same letter that I quoted a couple of days ago in regard to the Tea Party.

Writing to a grandson in 1836, Peter Edes said his father:

made his escape by disguising himself as a fisherman, and getting on board a fishing boat; and when they were a few miles from town he was landed on one of the islands, from which he made his escape to the main land.

To escape from Boston on a fishing vessel and to land on an island meant heading out into the harbor or beyond, not up the Charles River.

That detail matches a couple of contemporary reports from south of Boston, both sent to John Adams.

First, on 7 May Abigail Adams told her husband:

Poor Eads escaped out of town last night with one Ayers in a small boat, and was fired upon, but got safe and came up to Braintree to day. His name it seems was upon the black list.

On the same day James Warren wrote to his friend:

By the way I have Just heard that Edes has stole out. I wish his partner was with him. I called on Mrs. Adams as I came along. Found her and Family well.

Thus, Benjamin Edes left Boston in disguise on the night of 6 May. He may have brought out printing equipment, though these early sources don’t say that. I’d love to identify “Ayers,” but I’m not even certain of that spelling.

Edes must have landed somewhere off the south shore, given how Patriots in Braintree heard about his arrival within a day. Did Warren tell Adams, or did Adams tell Warren?

Then Edes made his way back toward the siege lines, settling in Watertown to be close to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, its news, and its printing jobs.

Edes’s partner, John Gill, didn’t get out of Boston. Instead, in the wake of the Battle of Bunker Hill he and the teen-aged Peter Edes were arrested and held in the Boston jail for several weeks.

COMING UP: Under one roof.

Aritfacts Lost, Strayed, or Stolen

The Journal of the American Revolution regularly asks its contributors to share a short answer to an intriguing question—a favorite event or person, a what-if possibility, a little-known example.

Usually I get intrigued, think about possible answers, often type up something to edit down to the requisite length. And then other things land on top of the task pile and I end up never sending in an answer.

But I was able to muster a reply to the latest challenge for contributors: “an artifact from the 1765–1805 era known to have existed well into the nineteenth century, that has since been stolen or gone missing.”

The various answers include one painting and three medals stolen in the second half of the twentieth century, several items of clothing that have probably been tossed out or disintegrated, and an entire financial archive.

Plus, Elias Boudinot’s handwritten memoir (which was, thankfully, transcribed and published before disappearing from archive shelves), two cannon captured at Saratoga and recaptured one war later, and possibly an entire Hessian colonel.

Another example occurs to me now, but I’m not sure it meets the criterion of having “existed well into the nineteenth century.”

On 16 Feb 1836, the printer Peter Edes, son of Benjamin Edes of the Boston Gazette and the Loyall Nine, wrote to his grandson:

It is a little surprising that the names of the tea-party were never made public: my father, I believe, was the only person who had a list of them, and he always kept it locked up in his desk while living. After his death Benj. Austin called upon my mother, and told her there was in his possession when living some very important papers belonging to the Whig party, which he wished not to be publicly known, and asked her to let him have the keys of the desk to examine it, which she delivered to him; he then examined it, and took out several papers, among which it was supposed he took away the list of the names of the tea-party, and they have not been known since.

Benjamin Edes died in 1803, his widow Martha in 1809, and this encounter would have happened between those dates, probably earlier. There were two politically active Benjamin Austins in Boston, father and son; the first died in 1806, the second in 1820.

Did Benjamin Edes really keep such a list, and why? Did Benjamin Austin do away with that document? If so, did he act because of the names that were on it or the names that weren’t on it?

“This scheme was revealed to General Gage”

Yesterday I analyzed the untenable claim that John Adams told descendants of Samuel Swift how the man had tried to spark an uprising inside besieged Boston.

So let’s set aside the claim that Adams was the source of this claim. How does the story itself stand up on its own?

The version published in The Memoirs of Gen. Joseph Gardner Swift (1890) stated:

the zeal and resolution of Samuel Swift…caused many Bostonians to secrete their arms when Gov. [Thomas] Gage offered the town freedom if arms were brought in to the arsenal; and that Mr. Swift presided at a freemason’s meeting where it was covertly agreed to use the arms concealed, and, in addition, pitchforks and axes, if need be, to assail the soldiery on the common; which scheme was betrayed to Gage, causing the imprisonment of Swift and others.

That wording has led some authors to state that Swift died in jail. In fact, we have jailhouse diaries from John Leach and Peter Edes covering the period when he died, and they don’t mention the prominent lawyer being locked up with them.

Another version of the story, published in Teele’s History of Milton (1887) and reprinted in Roberts’s history of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, said:

This scheme was revealed to General Gage, and Mr. Swift was arrested, he was permitted to visit his family, then at Newton, upon his parole to return at a given time. At the appointed time he returned, against the remonstrance of his friends, and so high an opinion of his character was entertained by General Gage that he was permitted to occupy his own house under surveillance. From disease induced by confinement, he died a prisoner in his own house…

Again, the military authorities were locking up people like Leach, Edes, and James Lovell for lesser threats, but this tale asks us to believe that not only did they not lock up Swift, they let him leave town.

And then Swift supposedly went back into Boston. Because, according to this lore, he was willing to lead an attack on soldiers with pitchforks and axes, but not to break his promise to Gen. Gage.

Even before that, the story is hard to believe. Swift was sixty years old, had no military experience, and had never been a militant political activist. It’s true he told Adams in October 1774, “I am no Swordsman but with my Gun or flail I fear no man…,” so it’s conceivable that he made similar boasts when the townspeople discussed turning over their weapons in late April 1775. But few Bostonians would have chosen Samuel Swift to lead an armed revolt.

No contemporaneous source mentions such an uprising. Gage, John Burgoyne, Peter Oliver, and other royal appointees wrote a lot about threats from Patriots, but none of them complained about Swift and an attack with pitchforks and axes. Samuel Swift was popular in Boston’s legal and mercantile circles, and no other American credited him with proposing an assault on the troops.

From early on, Swift’s widow and descendants perceived him to be a victim of Gen. Gage. Furthermore, they complained that Swift’s death led to the disappearance of the family wealth. (Though they also blamed “the unfaithfulness of his agent” for that.) They believed the fallout of his death meant his eldest son, fifteen-year-old Foster Swift, couldn’t follow his path to Harvard College. (In fact, by 1768 Foster had dropped out of the college-prep Latin School and was attending a Writing School; he went on to train in medicine under Dr. Joseph Gardner and had a long professional career.)

We don’t know why Samuel Swift didn’t receive a pass to leave Boston while his wife and children went out to Springfield. We don’t know what health issues contributed to his death on 30 Aug 1775. But the Swift family perceived great significance in how Samuel Swift died, and, at least in later generations, they wanted it to be significant for the nation as well.

TOMORROW: A debunking derailed.

“Masters Leach and Lovell were brought to prison”

On 29 June 1775, John Leach, a mariner in Boston’s North End, began to keep a journal. He started it out of anger because he had just been arrested by the British military authorities and he wanted to document what was happening to him.

Leach wrote:

Memorandums, began Thursday, June 29th, 1775.—At 3 this afternoon, a few steps from my House, I was seized upon by Major [Edward] Cane, of the Regulars, accompanied by one [Joshua] Loring, who is lately made a Sheriff: they obliged mo to return to my House, where Major Cane demanded my Keys of my Desks, and search’d all my Drawings, Writings, &c, and told me I had a great deal to answer for.

I replyed, it was very well, I stood ready at a minute’s warning to answer any accusation; I had a drawn Hanger, I could have took hold of in a moment, and cut them both down. I had both Courage and inclination to do it, tho’ they had each their swords by their sides, but I suddenly reflected, that I could not escape, as the whole Town was a prison. God wonderfully restrained me, as I should have lost my Life, either by them, or some of their Companions.

They then conducted me from my House to the Stone Gaol, and after being lodged there 20 minutes, the said Cane and Loring brought in Master James Lovell, after searching his Papers, Letters, &c. as they had done mine.

Cane carried my drawings to show Gen. [Thomas] Gage, next day, and returned them.

Leach’s diary was printed in the New England Historical and Genealogical Record in 1864.

Already in the Boston jail since 19 June was eighteen-year-old Peter Edes, son of the radical printer Benjamin Edes. The elder Edes had slipped out of town just before the war began and set up a press in Watertown.

Peter was also keeping a diary, and on 29 June he wrote:

Masters Leach and Lovell were brought to prison and put into the same room with me and my companions.

Peter Edes’s diary, which shares text with John Leach’s, was published in 1901.

Leach and Lovell both received the title “Master” because they kept schools. Leach taught navigation and other skills privately in the North End. Lovell was actually the usher, or assistant teacher, to his father, Master John Lovell, at the South Latin School, but the town valued him enough to pay him far more than any other usher. Lovell had also delivered the first official town oration in memory of the Boston Massacre back in April 1771.

The imprisonment of Lovell and Leach is one more thread of the story of Bunker Hill. And not just because the officer who arrested them was being promoted to major in the 43rd Regiment only because Maj. Roger Spendlove had died in that battle. (Spendlove had survived wounds at Québec, Martinique, and Havana, but not Charlestown.)

Lovell and Leach were locked up after the battle because the British commanders thought one of them was a spy.

TOMORROW: Incriminating letters.

“Hung! Up by the Neck!”

A few days back I quoted Lt. Col. Stephen Kemble’s diary entry for 8 Sept 1775 about an American soldier who deserted into Boston:

another Rifle Man came in, a fine fellow, an Irishman, from Kings County, says…that a report has been spread that one of their Deserters, a Rifle Man, had been Hanged, which checked the spirit of their People coming over to us.

That report of a hanging body appears in the diary of Pvt. Samuel Bixby, stationed in Roxbury, on 2 August:

One of Genl. [George] Washington’s riflemen was killed by the regulars to day & then hung! up by the neck! His comrades seeing this were much enraged, & immediately asked leave of the Genl. to go down and attack them. He gave them permission to go and do as they pleased. The Riflemen marched immediately & began operations. The regulars fired at them from all parts with cannon and swivels, but the Riflemen skulked about, and kept up their sharp shooting all day. Many of the regulars fell, but the riflemen lost only one man.

Some authors, most notably David McCullough in 1776, have treated this report as true.

However, Bixby appears to be the only diarist or letter-writer on either side of the siege lines who reported a rifleman or his body being strung up this way. In fact, Lt. Paul Lunt wrote that the British “killed none upon our side” in skirmishing that day.

Most telling, less than two weeks later Washington complained to Gen. Thomas Gage about the treatment of American prisoners of war but said nothing of a man being hanged or a corpse displayed.

It therefore seems likely that Bixby heard an unfounded rumor. Americans may have deliberately spread the story to incite resentment against the British, or to discourage defections, or both. Or the report could have been a natural exaggeration of the Pennsylvania riflemen’s concern about a comrade captured on 29 July, Cpl. Walter Cruise.

Kemble wrote that the American soldier taken that evening was “an Irish Man from Virginia; says he was forced into the service.” But claiming coercion got Cruise nowhere. The royal authorities put him into the Boston jail, where on 1 August fellow prisoner Peter Edes wrote, “the rifle corporal, Cruise, kept close confined, and allowed nothing but bread and water.”

Cruise was shipped to Nova Scotia as a prisoner during the evacuation and not released until around the start of 1777 in New York. (The rest of his military career mentioned here.) But at least he wasn’t hanged.

“Carpenter was sentenced to be hanged this day”

On 18 July 1775, the Dublin-born barber Richard Carpenter swam from Boston, held by the British military, to Dorchester, under the control of provincial troops.

On the night of 19 July, he swam back.

Boston selectman Timothy Newell reported in his journal that “Mr. Carpenter was taken by the night Patrole.” Teenager Peter Edes encountered him in the Boston jail as they were both taken to a building called Concert-Hall for a military inquiry and trial:

My four room companions and myself were escorted as before, with one Carpenter a barber, who swam from Boston to Cambridge [sic], and back again. The said Carpenter and Mr. [John] Hunt were examined.

An unnamed British officer wrote to someone in London on 25 July that Carpenter had been “caught last week swimming over to the rebels, with one of their General’s passes in his pocket.” Evidence in Gen. George Washington’s papers suggests that Carpenter had no interaction with him, but during his day on the American side of the siege lines he could have met Gen. John Thomas or even Gen. Artemas Ward. Or the British officer could have been passing on bad information.

The royal authorities quickly found Carpenter guilty and sentenced him to death. According to Newell, the barber heard

sentence passed on him to be executed the next day,—his coffin bro’t into the Goal-yard, his halter [i.e., noose] brought and he dressed as criminals are before execution.

Sentence was respited and a few days after was pardoned.

Newell didn’t write his journal entries on the dates attached to them, but a few days afterward, so events got mashed up. The young merchant William Cheever puts the mock execution on 21 July:

one Carpenter was sentenced to be hanged this day for carrying Intelligence over to the Provincials by swiming; however it was thought fit to reprieve him.

Other sources add more haze to the picture, however. According to that British officer on 25 July, Carpenter was still due to “be hanged in a day or two.” On Friday, 28 July, Ezekiel Price, outside of Boston, recorded this rumor:

the barber who swam from Boston to Dorchester about ten days ago, returned again into Boston, was taken up by General [Thomas] Gage, and hanged on Copps Hill last Saturday.

As for Peter Edes in the Boston jail, his journal never mentions Carpenter again.

So what was going on? The British authorities probably wanted to scare Carpenter into confessing all that he knew about the rebels’ intelligence operations. Which may not have been much, since he appears to have been acting on his own.

It’s also possible that the royal government wanted to scare other prisoners or Bostonians into cooperating, while also showing that it could be merciful. But in that case, I would expect to read more about Carpenter in Edes’s diary.

For a while I considered the possibility that Carpenter had been a British plant, with the aborted execution a way of providing him with cover, but other sources show that the army kept him locked up through the siege and beyond.

In the end, the British military found Carpenter suspicious and dangerous, but just wasn’t ready to hang him. I think that reflects how this early in the war neither side had the stomach for such fatal measures. The executions of Thomas Hickey and Nathan Hale were still several months away.

TOMORROW: Richard Carpenter in and out of prison.

Oh, It’s On Now!—Tea Party Talks in February

Last month the Shirley-Eustis House in Roxbury hosted a lecture by Jonathan Fairbanks titled “Rum Parties – Not Tea — Launched Liberty in 1768 for Boston and America.”

Later this month the same house museum will host Prof. Benjamin Carp speaking on his book Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America. Guess we won’t hear so much about rum then! Parliament never set a rum tax, after all! (It did put tariffs on the crucial ingredient of molasses, and colonies levied excise taxes on alcohol.) And Bostonians certainly never dumped rum into the harbor! (Like Capt. Jack Sparrow, they would never have been so wasteful.)

But can’t we all get along? According to Peter Edes’s recollection, quoted in full here, “on the afternoon preceding the evening of the destruction of the tea, a number of gentlemen met in the parlor of my father's house. . . . my station was in another room to make punch for them in the bowl which is now in your possession, and which I filled several times.” So the Boston Tea Party was probably carried out under the influence of rum punch.

Ben’s talk at the Shirley-Eustis House is scheduled for Sunday, 27 February, starting at 1:30 P.M. Admission is free, but donations and new membership fees are no doubt welcome.

In addition, Ben will speak about the challenge of researching individual Boston Tea Party participants at the New England Historic Genealogical Society on Wednesday, 23 February, starting at 6:00 P.M. The N.E.H.G.S. headquarters is at 99-101 Newbury Street in Boston’s Back Bay.

And earlier that day Ben’s speaking at the Museum of Fine Arts as part of its high-ticket afternoon semester course, “The American Journey 1620-Present: History, Art, and Culture.” So he might be appreciating tea’s caffeine content.

The Edes Punch Bowl (now in color)

The Massachusetts Historical Society recently featured this photograph of the Edes family punch bowl, one of the historic objects in its collection. In the accompanying essay, curator Anne Bentley puts the porcelain bowl in its contexts: the career of printer Benjamin Edes, the political crisis over tea in 1773, and the consumption of alcohol in British North America. I quoted Peter Edes’s letter describing the night of the Tea Party at his father’s shop at more length back here.

One theme of recent Tea Party scholarship, as in Marc Aronson’s The Real Revolution and Benjamin Carp’s upcoming Teapot in a Tempest, is the global dimensions of the event. The Tea Act of 1773 that got the eastern coast of North America all upset had its roots in Londoners’ investments in Indian transshipment of an agricultural product from China. This porcelain punch bowl from China, which had made its way to a middling family in Boston, is another sign of that global trade.

Dorringtons Accused of “Blowing Up Flies”

As I quoted back here, Boston selectman Timothy Newell recorded that on 14 July 1775:

Dorrington his son and daughter and the nurse for blowing up flies in the evening, they are charged with giving signals in this way to the army without.

Though Newell didn’t record this detail, William Dorrington was the keeper of the smallpox hospital in the west end of town, and therefore answered to the selectmen. Presumably “the nurse” worked at the hospital as well.

The Dorrington party were examined in court on 18 and 19 July and dismissed on the 26th. Fellow prisoner Peter Edes later wrote a list of nasty acts by the prison officials that included: “Also three dollars was demanded of Dorrington, and the provost kept his bed and bedding six days, and then delivered them up.”

A few months back John A. Nagy, an author who’s looking into Revolutionary War espionage, asked me what I thought “blowing up flies” meant. The Dorringtons’ fellow prisoners used that phrase and called the family “the Fly blowers,” so apparently it didn’t strike them as odd or in need of explanation.

I found another use of the phrase in the Annual Register for 1794, which gives a clearer sense of the act:

Brighthelmstone. A dreadful accident happened yesterday at Hove, in consequence of the inadvertency of a boy who was attempting to blow up flies with gunpowder, at a public-house. He had formed a train, for this purpose, across the side of the room, at the end of which stood a closet containing a great quantity of powder. A spark of the former unfortunately got among the latter, and, such were the dreadful consequences of the explosion, that the boy had one of his eyes blown out, and his face most shockingly mangled.

Two soldiers have likewise suffered so much by the same, that their lives are despaired of. There were several more in the apartment, who escaped unhurt. That part of the room, however, where the gunpowder stood, was intirely knocked down by the violence of the shock, and the house considerably damaged.

So it looks like “blowing up flies” meant exactly what it looks like: using gunpowder to set off small explosions in order to kill flies. A lot of flies, I hope, given the trouble and risk involved. Given that cleansing the smallpox hospital involved “smoking” the rooms and linens, however, perhaps people thought explosions could kill two types of bugs with one blast.

No doubt the besieged British garrison was on edge and suspicious about explosions in town. And the Dorringtons were “blowing up flies” at night, out on the side of the peninsula closest to the Continental troops in Cambridge. So they might have been lucky to be let out so quickly.

John Gill: "printing sedition treason and rebellion"

In his journal of the siege of Boston, Boston selectman Timothy Newell wrote this about 4 Aug 1775:

John Gill imprisoned, charged with printing sedition treason and rebellion.

Young Peter Edes wrote the same phrase in the diary he was keeping inside Boston’s jail:

Mr. John Gill, printer, was brought to prison and put in our room. He is charged with printing sedition, treason and rebellion.

Gill was the business partner of Peter’s father, Benjamin Edes, and thus had supervised Peter when he worked in the press room. The elder Edes had escaped to Watertown at the start of the war.

What did Gill do to warrant the serious charges against him? Basically, he printed sedition, treason, and rebellion—at least in the eyes of royal officials. Even before the start of the town’s long conflict with the Crown, Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette was the most radical, confrontational news outlet in town. Yet those men were also Boston’s official printers; the name “Gazette” signaled that their newspaper had the contract to publish the town’s business. The town and royal governments were at odds on many things, and the Boston Gazette championed the town’s causes.

In his diary for 3 Sept 1769, John Adams revealed how close the relationship between Whig leaders and the Gazette was:

Spent the Remainder of the Evening and supped with Mr. [James] Otis, in Company with Mr. [Samuel] Adams, Mr. Wm. Davis, and Mr. Jno. Gill. The Evening spent in preparing for the Next Days Newspaper—a curious Employment. Cooking up Paragraphs, Articles, Occurences, &c.—working the political Engine!

One anonymous article the Gazette carried in January 1768 so enraged rival printer John Mein that he came to the Edes and Gill shop, demanding to know who had written it. When Gill refused to tell, Mein hit him over the head with a stick. Gill sued for assault, using Otis as his attorney, and won a judgment of £75. (It’s possible that Otis himself was the anonymous author.)

On 19 March 1770, two weeks after the Boston Massacre, Gen. Thomas Gage wrote from his headquarters in New York to the Massachusetts governor:

The Diabolical Account given of the late unhappy Affair in the Boston Papers, particularly that of Edes and Gill, is too preposterous and absurd to gain credit with any that are not prejudiced, and I am glad you are preparing a true and impartial Narrative of the Affair.

Edes and Gill sold Paul Revere’s engraving of the Massacre and, after the young artist complained, Henry Pelham’s earlier image as well.

As Boston’s preferred printers, Edes and Gill issued the town’s official report on the shootings, called A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre. The town meeting voted to send copies of that report to England, but to keep it out of circulation locally so as not to prejudice a jury. When an English press reprinted it and shipped some copies back, Edes and Gill asked if they could start selling their stock after all. The town said no. It looks like the printers then created a facsimile of the London title page, bound it with their sheets, and sold those copies as if they had been imported.

But the partners didn’t just confine themselve to printing the news. They also helped to organize events. The Edes and Gill’s print shop became a regular meeting-place for Boston’s leading Whigs, and the Green Dragon Tavern was next door. Edes was part of the Loyall Nine who organized the first Stamp Act protests in 1765. During the nonimportation movement of 1769-70, Edes and Gill printed the notices to call mass meetings of “the Body”—the whole citizenry of Boston. In late 1773, they collected names of citizens who wished to patrol Griffin’s Wharf to keep the East India Company tea from being loaded, and Peter Edes remembered men gathering at his father’s shop on the evening of the Boston Tea Party.

In fact, it’s somewhat surprising that the military authorities hadn’t locked up John Gill before. According to Peter Edes, on 23 June:

[Customs Commissioner] Benjamin Hallowell came into the yard and asked the provost [i.e., jailer] if he had not one Gill in prison, the provost told him no; but that he had Edes’s son, upon which he came into my room, and said I was a damned rascal, and ought to have been hanged long ago.

As of 4 Aug 1775, John Gill was finally in jail.

Carpenter Sentenced to Hang—or Maybe Not

Tonight I break off from testimony about the Boston Massacre to a more mysterious story from 237 years ago.

Ezekiel Price (c. 1728-1802) was a familiar face in Boston business circles: he was variously Clerk of the Court of Common Pleas, Registrar of Deeds, notary public, and an insurance broker. However, in the summer of 1775 Price had gotten out of Boston and behind the provincial lines. He kept a diary that noted other people’s departures from town and the news they brought with them. On 19 July 1775, Price recorded this tidbit:

One Carpenter, who last evening swam from Boston to Dorchester, says that it was very sickly in Boston; and that provisions were very scarce in Boston, and the people in great distress.

This was a man named Carpenter, not a carpenter, but I haven’t been able to identify his first name. [ADDENDUM FROM MARCH 2011: His name was Richard Carpenter.] All I can say for sure is that he didn’t stick around in Dorchester.

Boston selectman Timothy Newell recorded the next chapter in Carpenter’s story:

20th [July]. Mr. Carpenter was taken by the night Patrole—upon examination he had swum over to Dorchester and back again, was tried here that day and sentence passed on him to be executed the next day,—his coffin bro’t into the Goal-yard, his halter [i.e., noose] brought and he dressed as criminals are before execution. Sentence was respited and a few days after was pardoned.

(“Goal” was a common eighteenth-century spelling for “jail.”)

Back to Ezekiel Price. On Friday, 28 July, he wrote down this rumor:

Hear that Carpenter, the barber who swam from Boston to Dorchester about ten days ago, returned again into Boston, was taken up by General [Thomas] Gage, and hanged on Copps Hill last Saturday.

That hanging would have been on 22 July. Newell’s account implies that Carpenter was prepared for execution on the 21st. He was writing from the perspective of “a few days after,” so he might have had the date wrong but the outcome right. So was Carpenter hanged or not?

The man also pops up in the jailhouse diary of Peter Edes, a teenager left behind by his father, printer Benjamin Edes, and then arrested on charges of “concealing firearms.” On the 18th and 19th Peter and his cellmates had been taken to the Concert Hall for a military inquiry, which went nowhere. On the 20th, he wrote:

My four room companions and myself were escorted as before, with one Carpenter a barber, who swam from Boston to Cambridge [sic], and back again. The said Carpenter and Mr. [John] Hunt were examined.

We were all sent to prison again, under a strong guard. This is the third day we were carried out to trial, (four hours each time, and nothing asked but what was mentioned before,) and no examination, under all the disgrace and contempt they could contrive.

The next day, young Edes wrote, “No court of inquiry held, so that we are still held in suspense. We had been in prison 29 days, when we found out by chance from the serjeant’s return, what our crimes were, and yet we were ordered to prepare for trial, and not accused of any thing.” (Imagine how bitter Peter Edes would have been if he’d been locked up that way for four or five years, like some young men his age today.)

Edes never mentioned Carpenter again. Either a fake execution and pardon or a real hanging would have caught his attention if he’d heard about them. So Carpenter’s fate was apparently not widely reported back in the jail. Yet Price heard that he was hanged, and Newell that he’d been pardoned.

I wish I knew the full story here. Was Carpenter a smuggler? Was he gathering information or carrying messages—and if so, for which side? Did the military authorities decide he was harmless, or did he save himself by offering to cooperate with them? Were the preparations for hanging meant to scare him, or to scare or impress others?

John Leach and the "Aides-de-Diable"

As I mentioned last month, British officers apparently found letters from Boston schoolmaster James Lovell on Dr. Joseph Warren’s body after the Battle of Bunker Hill. (At left is a detail from an engraving of the Death of Warren as painted by John Trumbull, courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.)

But whatever evidence pointed to Lovell doesn’t seem to have been exact because on the same day the authorities detained him, they also arrested Boston’s other Patriot teacher with the initials J.L.

That was John Leach (1724-1799), a native of England who had settled in Boston’s North End after spending several years at sea. He wasn’t a public school teacher like Lovell, but rather offered private lessons in navigation and mathematics to aspiring sea captains. He and his wife Sarah had seventeen children, the youngest born in 1774. Among those children, son John, Jr., had witnessed the Boston Massacre in 1770. According to Annie Haven Thwing’s Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston, Leach was known for wearing his hats until they wore out because he disliked taking on any debt.

Maj. Edward Cairn (whose Scottish name Bostonians insisted on spelling “Kane” or, more biblically, “Cain”) arrested Leach on the afternoon of 29 June 1775, seizing his papers—probably maps and other drawings that seemed suspicious. About twenty minutes after Leach arrived at Boston’s jail, the new Suffolk County sheriff, Joshua Loring, Jr., and Cairn brought in Lovell as well.

At some point Leach began to keep notes on his confinement with the help of eighteen-year-old printer’s apprentice Peter Edes, who had been locked up since 19 June. Both Leach and Edes recorded this incident in their diaries for 1 July 1775:

Major Harry Rooke took a Book of Religion from Mr. Joseph Otis, the Gaol keeper, who told him the Book belonged to some of the Charlestown prisoners, taken at Bunker’s Hill fight, and was given them by a Clergyman of the Town.

He carried it to Show General [Thomas] Gage, and then brought it back, and said, “It is your G–d Damned Religion of this Country that ruins the Country; Damn your Religion.”

Rooke was one of the general’s aides de camp—or “Aids-de-Diable,” as Edes would have it. (I’ve seen Rooke’s formal rank stated as lieutenant.) Leach, the Englishman, added:

I would only add this remark, that this Pious officer holds his Commission by a Sacramental Injunction, from his most Sacred Majesty King George the 3d.

British army officers had a hard time understanding New England Congregationalism. They often confused it with Presbyterianism, the established church in Scotland. They couldn’t figure out why Congregationalist ministers weren’t supporting the king, who was head of the Church of England back home. And they distrusted the fervency of New England’s Puritan descendants—the fervency that inspired young Edes to label his enemy as the “Diable.” But as Leach remarked, both sides thought God was on their side.

Peter Edes's Tea Party Memories

On 16 Feb 1836, an elderly printer in Bangor, Maine, named Peter Edes wrote to his grandson, Benjamin C. Edes, about events in Boston over sixty years before. Two recent books based on the memories of George R. T. Hewes had produced a great deal of excitement in America over the "Tea Party," as writers had just started to call the destruction of the East India Company tea on 16 Dec 1773.

Peter Edes described his memories of that evening, one day before he turned seventeen. He had an inside look at the event, though limited, because his father was Benjamin Edes, Boston's leading radical printer:

You request of me a particular account of the "tea-party," so called. I know but little about it, as I was not admitted into their presence, for fear, I suppose, of their being known; but what little I know I give you, so far as I can remember.

I recollect perfectly well that on the afternoon preceding the evening of the destruction of the tea, a number of gentlemen met in the parlor of my father's house—how many I cannot say. As I said before, I was not admitted into their presence, my station was in another room to make punch for them in the bowl which is now in your possession, and which I filled several times.

They remained in the house till dark, I suppose to disguise themselves like Indians, when they left the house and proceeded to the wharves where the vessels lay. Before they reached there, they were joined by hundreds. After they left the room, I went into it; but my father was not there. I therefore thought I would take a walk to the wharves, as a spectator, where was collected, I must say, as many as 2,000 persons.

The Indians worked smartly. Some were in the hold immediately after the hatches were broken open, fixing the ropes to the tea-chests; others were hauling up the chests; and others stood ready with their hatchets to cut off the bindings of the chest and cast them overboard. I remained on the wharf till I was tired, leaving the Indians working like good industrious fellows. This is all I know about it.

The bowl I left in your mother's possession I present to you most cheerfully, hoping it will never go out of the family. . . .

It is a little surprising that the names of the tea-party were never made public: my father, I believe, was the only person who had a list of them, and he always kept it locked up in his desk while living. After his death [in 1803] Benj. Austin called upon my mother, and told her there was in his possession when living some very important papers belonging to the Whig party, which he wished not to be publicly known, and asked her to let him have the keys of the desk to examine it, which she delivered to him; he then examined it, and took out several papers, among which it was supposed he took away the list of the names of the tea-party, and they have not been known since.

Some historians doubt such a list actually existed. In any event, it has never surfaced.