Miss Quincy, Mrs. Lincoln, Mrs. Storer, and the Adamses

In the fall of 1761, Hannah (Quincy) Lincoln (shown here, courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums) struck up a correspondence with Abigail Smith, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the minister of Weymouth.

At the time, Lincoln was twenty-five years old and had been married a little over a year. She apparently set out to mentor the teen-aged girl in finding a beau.

On 5 October, Abigail wrote back (in a version probably regularized in spelling and punctuation before being published in 1840):

You bid me tell one of my sparks (I think that was the word) to bring me to see you. Why! I believe you think they are as plenty as herrings, when, alas! there is as great a scarcity of them as there is of justice, honesty, prudence, and many other virtues. I’ve no pretensions to one.

Back in 1759, a young lawyer named John Adams had accompanied his friend Richard Cranch on a visit to the Smith household. Cranch would eventually marry the oldest daughter, Mary. But Adams had come away unimpressed by the Smith girls—“Not fond, not frank, not candid.” In his eyes then, they didn’t compare to “H.Q.,” whom he thought “Tender and fond. Loving and compassionate.”

As I quoted back here, Adams came close to proposing to Hannah Quincy, but didn’t. Which of course meant that she may have had no idea how interested he was. She married Dr. Bela Lincoln instead.

On 30 Dec 1761, a little less than two months after Abigail had told Mrs. Lincoln she had no beaus, John Adams wrote with Cranch to her older sister to say, “our good Wishes are pour’d forth for the felicity of you, your family and Neighbours.—My—I dont know what—to Mrs. Nabby.” He was trying to flirt. Within three years, John Adams and Abigail Smith were married.

Both the Adamses remained friendly with Hannah Lincoln—she was, after all, a cousin of Abigail’s; a sister of John’s legal colleagues Samuel and Josiah Quincy, Jr.; and a neighbor back in Braintree after the death of her first husband.

In October 1777 Abigail was pleased to report to John that “our Friend Mrs. L——n of this Town” was engaged “to Deacon S——r of Boston, an exceeding good match and much approved of.” Everybody liked and respected Ebenezer Storer.

As Abigail Adams traveled away from Massachusetts in the 1780s and 1790s, Hannah Storer continued to correspond with her on topics like social events, children, and fashions. Her political comments were general, though she expressed indignation at John Adams being turned out of the Presidency.

Ebenezer Storer died in 1807. Abigail Adams died in 1818. Their widowed spouses lived on in Boston and Braintree, evidently not seeing each other regularly if at all.

Josiah Quincy, Jr. (1802-1882), Hannah Storer’s great-nephew, wrote in his memoir Figures of the Past about bringing them together sometime in the 1820s:

Among my boyish recollections [of Braintree] there is distinctly visible a very pretty hill, which rose from the banks of the river, or what passed for one, and was covered with trees of the original forest growth. This was known as Cupid’s Grove; and it had been known under that title for at least three generations, and perhaps from the settlement of the town. The name suggests the purposes to which this sylvan spot was dedicated. It was the resort of the lovers of the vicinage, or of those who, if circumstances favored, might become so. The trunks of the trees were cut and scarred all over with the initials of ladies who were fair and beloved. . . .

I, a young man, just entering life, was deputed to attend my venerable relative on a visit to the equally venerable ex-President. Both parties were verging upon their ninetieth year. They had met very infrequently, if at all, since the days of their early intimacy.

When Mrs. Storer entered the room, the old gentleman’s face lighted up, as he exclaimed, with ardor, “What! Madam, shall we not go walk in Cupid’s Grove together?”

To say the truth, the lady seemed somewhat embarrassed by this utterly unlooked-for salutation. It seemed to hurry her back through the past with such rapidity as fairly to take away her breath. But self-possession came at last, and with it a suspicion of girlish archness, as she replied, “Ah, sir, it would not be the first time that we have walked there!”

Mrs. Storer could still flirt. And President Adams, he was still trying.

A New Women’s History Podcast to Enjoy

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant is a new podcast hosted by Kathryn Gehred, one of the editors working on the forthcoming scholarly collection of Martha Washington’s correspondence.

Each episode digs into one letter to or from a woman in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, highlighting the historical and personal context of that communication.

I like how Gehred and her guests are comfortable with the fact that one of the appeals of historical research is being able to read other people’s private mail.

Episode 5, “An Age of Discovery,” is a fine example. This conversation delves into a letter that Mary Cranch wrote to her younger sister Abigail Adams in 1786. As Gehred and her guest Rachel Steinberg discuss, Cranch crafted her letter to lead up to the juiciest piece of local gossip.

Go listen and come back. Or at least read the letter. Because I’m going to tack more gossip onto this episode.

Mary Cranch was married to Richard Cranch, as the podcast says. He came to America in 1746 with his sister Mary and her husband, Joseph Palmer. The Palmers and Cranches joined the locally grown Quincys and Adamses in making up north Braintree’s Whig gentry.

The Palmers’ eldest son was Joseph Pearse Palmer, who married Elizabeth Hunt across the border in New Hampshire in 1772. He was twenty-two, a recent Harvard graduate; she was seventeen. After the war, the Palmer family moved into Boston, but their fortunes fell through a combination of business failures, ill health, and general economic stress. The elder Joseph Palmer ended up in a dispute over debts with John Hancock before dying in 1788.

Joseph Pearse Palmer, through professional setbacks, psychological depression, and perhaps other personal issues, spent months at a time away from his family. Elizabeth Palmer took in boarders, including a young attorney and author named Royall Tyler (shown above).

Back in 1782, Tyler had settled in Braintree, boarding with the Cranches. During that time he wooed Nabby Adams, the Adamses’ eldest child. Her parents and the Cranches were more enthused about this than she was. Nabby put Tyler off until she sailed with her mother to Europe. There she met and married William Stephens Smith, the “Coll Smith” mentioned in this letter. Tyler came away with the first surviving volume of John Adams’s diary, eventually discovered among his papers, and looked around for new conquests.

That provided the conditions for the scene Mary Cranch described at the end of this letter, which must have taken place at Elizabeth Palmer’s boarding house in Boston. In the spring of 1786, Joseph P. Palmer had come home after many months to find his wife very friendly with boarder Tyler and a few months pregnant. The baby arrived in September 1786.

“I was determin’d to see” the newborn girl, Mary Cranch told her sister, to confirm that the baby had arrived full term. She saw Joseph P. Palmer, Elizabeth Palmer, and Royall Tyler all in a bedroom together, resolutely not acknowledging anything odd about the situation.

And this is the point I can’t stress enough: Joseph P. Palmer, the dupe of Mary Cranch’s story, was her own nephew.

“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.

Choc-Talk at the Boston Athenaeum, 7 Jan.

On Thursday, 7 January, the Boston Athenaeum will host a lecture by Anthony M. Sammarco on “The Baker Chocolate Company: A Sweet History,” which is also the title of his new book. The talk will start at 12:00 noon. It’s free, but one must reserve a spot by calling 617-720-7600.

The event description says:

The Baker Chocolate Company was founded along the Neponset River in 1765 by Dr. James Baker and James Hannon, a skilled chocolate maker. Over the next two centuries, the company became one of the leading manufacturers of chocolate and cocoa in North America.

I’ve seen notices of similar talks by Mr. Sammarco at other venues, too.

The Baker chocolate factory in Dorchester is often said to be the first in North America. However, the descendants of Joseph Palmer of Braintree wrote that a chocolate factory was among the workshops he and Richard Cranch erected in the Germantown section of that town before the Revolution. And other Bostonians were advertising chocolate in the newspapers as early as the 1720s.

I’m not sure how the Baker Chocolate Company documentation stacks up against the rest. The company has not been shy about promoting its history. Then again, neither were the Palmer descendants.

“The Importation of Germans”

In a recent Boston Globe, Stephen Kenney described how our country’s conflicting attitudes toward immigrant labor—both “Stay Out” and “Come Do Our Dirty Work”—have deep roots:

In the mid-18th century, the Province of Massachusetts Bay recruited German immigrants to work as printers and glassmakers. A lottery was established to finance the project, and skilled workers were exempted from military service. . . .

In 1750, the Massachusetts General Court crafted an immigration reform measure: “An Act to prevent the Importation of Germans and other Foreign Passengers in too Great a Number in one Vessel.” It reflected a fear of disease. “Through want of necessary room and Accommodations,” aboard ships, “they may often Contract Mortal and Contagious Distempers [and infect others] on their arrival.” . . .

Today, records of this German immigration remain in the Massachusetts Archives. During the Great Depression they were taped into notebooks as part of a WPA project. A grant from the National Foundation for the Humanities funded their conservation, preserving them from the corrosive effects of brown, oozing tape and iron gall ink.

Among those Germans coming into the Broad Bay area of northern Massachusetts (now Maine) in 1752 were Georg Frederich Seiter, born 1727 in Langensteinbach, and Christine Salome Hartwick. The following year, they moved down to Braintree, when Joseph Palmer and Richard Cranch were trying to establish a glass factory and other early industrial facilities in an area still called Germantown. George and Sarah, as the young immigrants came to be known, got married on 20 Mar 1753.

The Seiders (another name change) had three children in Braintree, the last being a son they named Christopher, baptized 18 Mar 1759. After the glass factory burned, the family moved to Boston, where they had three more children. Around the time of his eleventh birthday, Christopher became the first person to die in a Boston riot against the new Crown policies. (Here’s what happened.) So there’s a direct link between this wave of immigration at mid-century and the Revolution a generation later.

Most of the preceding genealogical information comes from Wilford W. Whitaker and Gary T. Horlacher’s Broad Bay Germans: 18th Century German-Speaking Settlers of Present-Day Waldoboro, Maine, published in 1998 by Picton Press.