Another Mystery of Nero Faneuil

The likelihood that George Washington’s cook Hercules took his first owner’s surname and went by Hercules Posey in New York brought back thoughts about how another black man might have negotiated slavery and freedom in the early republic.

Last month I highlighted the name of “Nero Funels” on a 1777 Massachusetts anti-slavery petition. I posited that this was a phonetic spelling of Faneuil, and that the same man as Nero Faneuil was involved in two Boston burglaries in 1784.

One of the witnesses in those trials was Nero Faneuil’s wife Flora. Two other witnesses were surnamed Hitchborn (or a variation on that name):

• Prince Hitchborn, almost certainly given that first name as an enslaved child, was at Nero and Flora Faneuil’s house in November 1784.
• Elite young lawyer Benjamin Hichborn testified to Nero’s character.

That suggests some link between the Nero Faneuil and the Hitchborn household in the North End.

Boston town records state that on 20 Apr 1780 Nero Williams of Roxbury and Flora Hitchburne, “free negroes,” were married. I haven’t found any record of the marriage of Nero and Flora Faneuil. Nor have I found any other mention of Nero Williams. To be sure, there were other black men named Nero and other black women named Flora, but I haven’t found any other married couples with those names.

So here’s one possible reconstruction of Nero Faneuil’s life. He was either born into slavery or enslaved by a member of the Faneuil family, and used that family’s surname when signing the anti-slavery petition in 1777.

The Revolution sent different members of the white mercantile Faneuil family in different directions:

• Benjamin Faneuil, Sr., had become blind and lived in retirement with his daughter and son-in-law, Mary and George Bethune, in the part of Cambridge that became Brighton.
• That man’s sons Benjamin, Jr., and Peter were Loyalists, moving to Canada and elsewhere during the war and thus at risk of losing their Massachusetts property.
• Pierre Benjamin Faneuil, a francophone cousin, came to Boston from Saint-Domingue with the hope of raising a regiment of French Canadians to support the Continental cause, but died of illness in 1777 before accomplishing anything.

Nero Faneuil might have belonged to any of those households in 1777 and then been sold to someone named Williams in Roxbury by 1780. Joseph Williams was a big farmer in that town, for example. If so, town authorities might have listed Nero with the surname Williams in 1780 in the record of his marriage to Flora Hitchburne.

In 1783, Massachusetts’s high court ruled slavery unenforceable. By the following year Nero Faneuil was a free man in Boston married to a woman named Flora. Was he also Nero Williams, having reverted to using the Faneuil surname?

“If I would go with them to commit this Robery”

As I said yesterday, the only reason we know more than perfunctory details about the trial of two men for stealing a chest from James Lovell in 1784 is because Massachusetts attorney general Robert Treat Paine took notes.

Those notes aren’t word-for-word transcriptions of the testimony, and they leave lots of mysteries. Which makes me all the more grateful for the scholars behind the Massachusetts Historical Society’s publication of Paine’s papers. I mean, just look at the handwriting in his notes from a 1780 trial.

Here’s my best recreation of how the burglary took place, based on the testimony at the February 1785 grand jury session and the 3 March trial.

Thomas Archibald and William Scott appear to have been strangers to Boston. A woman named Flora Fanueil testified that “abt. a Week before the Theft they were at our house.” This was probably Nero Faneuil’s wife, and her remark shows that the black couple had their own residence.

About seven o’clock on the evening of Monday, 22 November, James Lovell made an accounting of the Continental notes and loan certificates entrusted to him. He filed those papers in a large chest, a yard long and weighing 168 pounds. Then he “threw in money half Crowns French” and his pocket book. Mary Capen, likely a maid in the Lovell house, said, “I barr’d that window where the chest was & locked it, I went to bed abt. 11 oClock.”

Meanwhile, Archibald and Scott had returned to Nero and Flora Faneuil’s house, as confirmed by witnesses Prince Hitchborn and Jack Austin. Hitchborn had probably been enslaved by the Hichborn family. There was also a rich white family in Boston named Austin, and Jack Austin might have served them—or he might have been unrelated. About eight o’clock, Flora Fanueil said, Archibald and Scott went away.

Nero Faneuil testified:

they asked me if I would go with them to commit this Robery, they said they would come again at 11 oClock or 12. I went to bed abt. 11; got up & saw them about the house: at 12 oClock we were by Mr. Lovels & it struck 12.

Archebald opned the Window as high as he could lift, he pressed & found the bar, he pushed it in with his foot he pulled off his shoes & got in, Scot came to the Window and told Scot to come in, Scot pulld off his Shoes & got it, the Clock struck one…

A neighbor named Archibald McNeal, living about “170 yds. off,” reported that “abt. 2 oClock [he] heard a strange noise like stroks of a Maul.” Looking outside, he saw men “kept coming & going.” When “sparks of fire” threw light on the scene, he could make out one person who “had no hat on & short hair [and] chest thick.“

Archibald, Scott, and Faneuil carried the heavy chest away “to the new house,” the latter said. Then ”Archiebald got my ax [and] pryed open the chest.” Inside the men found some “hard money,” which Scott put “into his hat.” As for the papers, Archibald and Scott “said they would Separate the Bank bills & burn the rest.” According to Faneuil, his confederates

told me to take care of them [the bills] till the noise was over, they wd. go to Providence stay 2 or 3 mo. & then come back again

they tarried at my house till the Clock struck 6. they then went off.

On the morning of 23 November, Lovell stated, “abt. 7 oClock I found my Window open Shutters on the floor.” He was struck by the fact that “my plate was in the room, [but] they did not touch it.”

Outside, it appears, McNeal came across more evidence of the crime: ”next morning before sunrise I saw the Letters, Baggs marked wth. Mr. Lovells Name & the Chest marked.” But the money and, more important to Lovell, the official papers were missing.

TOMORROW: Returning to the scene of the crime.