“To see the minutes made by the secretary”

Here’s another controversy from 1770 that I didn’t note on the exact 250th anniversaries of its notable dates since I had other topics at hand and, frankly, it was drawn out more than it really deserved.

On 6 March, the day after the Boston Massacre, Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and his Council met in the Town House (now the Old State House museum, maintained by Revolutionary Spaces).

As I discussed back here, the town of Boston also had a meeting that day to urge the royal authorities into moving the army regiments out of town. Eventually Hutchinson and the army commander, Lt. Col. William Dalrymple, agreed to do that as long as the other took at least an equal share of the blame for conceding.

The provincial Secretary, Andrew Oliver, wanted the authorities in London to understand the pressures that Hutchinson—his friend, relative, and political ally—was under. So in his first draft of the official records of that Council meeting, Oliver wrote:

Divers gentlemen of the council informed his honour the lieutenant-governor, They were of opinion, that it was the determination of the people to have the troops removed from the town; and that this was not the sense of the inhabitants of the town of Boston only, but of other towns in the neighbourhood, who stood ready to come in, in order to effect this purpose, be the consequence of it what it may; unless they shall be withdrawn by the commanding officers, which, in their opinion, was the only method to prevent the effusion of blood, and, in all probability, the destruction of his Majesty’s troops, who must be overpowered by numbers, which would not be less than ten to one.

The next morning, however, the Council met again and asked “to see the minutes made by the secretary of this day’s proceedings set in order.” They thought Oliver’s summary sounded like a threat of rebellion and violence. The Councilors adopted new language instead:

That the people of this, and some of the neighbouring towns, were so exasperated and incensed, on account of the inhuman and barbarous destruction of a number of the inhabitants by the troops, that they apprehended imminent danger of further bloodshed, unless the troops were forthwith removed from the body of the town, which, in their opinion, was the only method to prevent it.

That text went into the official minutes.

But a week later, on 13 March, Oliver wrote out a more detailed description of what Councilors had told the governor. This time he named names, quoting one seasoned politician at length:

Mr. [Royall] Tyler had said, “That it was not such people as had formerly pulled down the lieutenant-governor’s house which conducted the present measures, but that they were people of the best character among us—men of estates, and men of religion: That they had formed their plan, and that this was a part of it to remove the troops out of town, and after that the commissioners: That it was impossible the troops should remain in town; that the people would come in from the neighbouring towns, and that there would be 10,000 men to effect the removal of the troops, and that they would probably be destroyed by the people—should it be called rebellion—should it incur the loss of our charter, or be the consequence what it would.”

Divers other gentlemen adopted what Mr. Tyler had said, by referring expressly to it, and thereupon excusing themselves from enlarging. Mr. [James] Russell of Charlestown and Mr. [Samuel] Dexter of Dedham, confirmed what he said respecting the present temper and disposition of the neighbouring towns; every gentlemen spoke of the occasion, and unanimously expressed their sense of the necessity of the immediate removal of the troops from the town, and advised his honour to pray that colonel Dalrymple would order the troops down to Castle William;

one gentlemen [Harrison Gray], to enforce it, said, ”That the lieutenant-governor had asked the advice of the council, and they had unanimously advised him to a measure; which advice, in his opinion, laid the lieutenant-governor under an obligation to act agreeably thereto.” Another gentlemen [John Erving] pressed his compliance with greater earnestness, and told him, “That if after this any mischief should ensue, by means of his declining to join with them, the whole blame must fall upon him; but that if he joined with them, and colonel Dalrymple, after that, should refuse to remove the troops, the blame would then lie at his door.”

Oliver swore to the truth of that account and put it on the next ship to London. There it was printed along with depositions about local hostility to the king’s soldiers in A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance at Boston in New England. And then that pamphlet came back to Boston.

TOMORROW: More pamphlets.

Dr. Dexter’s Boys

When Lydia (Woods Dexter) Curtis died at the end of 1772, her three surviving sons were all in their late teens, of age to be apprentices. They may therefore have left the household of their stepfather, Dr. Samuel Curtis.

Lydia was from a large and established family in Marlborough. The boys’ paternal relatives in Dedham were also rich enough to take them in if that seemed like the best course. (In 1771 their grandmother there offered to pay “the Charge of Rideing” for one boy so that he could recover from an illness through “moderate exercise.”)

Two of those Dexter boys went into medical professions, and it’s possible that Dr. Curtis helped to train them. But it’s also possible those sons were inspired entirely by their father, Dr. Ebenezer Dexter, and wanted little to do with Curtis. Here’s what we know about the next generation of Dexters.

William (1755-1785) went out to Shrewsbury, perhaps to train under Dr. Edward Flynt, who had treated his father in his last illness. In February 1775, at the age of nineteen, William married a local woman named Betsy Bowker, age twenty-one. Their first child, named Ebenezer after William’s father, arrived eight and a half months later.

By then, Edward Flynt and William Dexter had enlisted as surgeon and surgeon’s mate for Gen. Artemas Ward’s regiment of the Massachusetts army. The young man’s handwritten commission signed by James Warren for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress appears above. Dexter served in the Continental Army through the siege of Boston and accompanied the regiment down to New York under Col. Jonathan Ward.

Betsy Dexter, according to her 1843 application for a pension, was living at her father’s house in Shrewsbury all this time. William “returned after warm weather in 1776,” she recalled. He had reached the age of majority that April, and I wonder if he inherited his father’s estate in Marlborough. (It’s worth recalling that Dr. Curtis decided to leave town and go to sea the next spring.)

According to his wife, William brought his little family home to Marlborough in December 1776 and set up his own practice as a physician. William and Betsy had children in 1777, 1778, and 1779, all of them living to adulthood. But like his father, William Dexter died young, at age thirty. His widow Betsy remarried ten years later to a man named Edward Low and settled in Leominster, living until 1846.

Samuel Dexter (1756-1825) became an apothecary, married Elizabeth Province in Northampton in 1790, and settled in Albany, New York. She was a daughter of John and Sarah Province of Boston, and thus a sister of the David Province whom George Gailer sued for helping to tar and feather him in 1769, when she was six. How she got to Northampton is a mystery. Samuel and Elizabeth had five children, three living to adulthood. Samuel was the longest-lived of the brothers, and Elizabeth died in 1846.

John Dexter (1758-1807) worked as a quartermaster sergeant for the Continental Army for several years under Col. Timothy Bigelow of Worcester. On 3 Mar 1783 he married a woman from Marlborough named Mary Woods, likely a cousin on his mother’s side, with a justice of the peace from Stow rather than a local minister presiding. John and Mary Dexter’s first daughter arrived in late December, and three more children followed by 1794.

John was a tanner. He gained the militia rank of ensign under Gov. John Hancock. In the 1790s the Dexters moved to Berlin. Then John “went into Trade,” and in 1802 he moved the family into Boston. John died five years later, Mary in 1823. The children all lived well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, but none had children.

John Dexter’s third child was John Haven Dexter (1791-1867), who apprenticed at Benjamin Russell’s Columbian Centinel but then went to work in the mercantile firm of Amos and Abbott Lawrence. J. H. Dexter wrote two books (Mercantile Honor, and Moral Honesty and A Plea for the Horse) and also left several manuscripts of genealogical information and gossip about his family and fellow Bostonians, some helpfully transcribed and published in 1997.

When Gov. Bernard Went Negative

Yesterday we left Gov. Francis Bernard on 25 May 1768 with a Council newly selected by the Massachusetts legislature—which was largely hostile to him.

On the first day of their term, the legislators had pointedly passed over Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and removed two of Bernard’s political allies from the Council while adding seven others. The newly named gentlemen were:

• Jerathmeel Bowers (1717-99) of Swansea.
• Samuel Dexter (1726-1810) of Dedham.
• Joseph Gerrish (1708-1776) of Newbury.
• John Hancock (1737-1793) of Boston.
• James Otis, Sr. (1702-1788, shown here) of Barnstable.
• Thomas Sanders (1729-1774) of Gloucester.
• Artemas Ward (1727-1800) of Shrewsbury.

Under Massachusetts’s provincial charter, the royal governor could “negative,” or veto, anyone named to the Council whom he didn’t want to work with. In practice, governors were reluctant to knock off Councilors who were already sitting because gentlemen could see that as an affront. So this moment was Bernard’s best chance to get an advisory board to his liking.

James Otis, Sr., had been the lower house’s speaker in 1761 and 1762 and then served three years on the Council. But during that time he was also in a bitter feud with Bernard because the governor hadn’t fulfilled his predecessor’s promise to put Otis on Massachusetts’s high court. (Instead, Bernard had appointed Hutchinson.) In 1766 the governor had finally gotten sick of Otis’s opposition and negatived him from the Council.

Bernard had issued hints about letting Otis back on the board if the legislators chose Hutchinson as well. But Otis himself opposed such a deal, and his son was the most powerful member of the lower house, so it didn’t happen. By electing Otis, the legislators were simply poking Bernard again.

Likewise, Bernard had negatived Bowers, Dexter, Gerrish, and Sanders in 1766 and then again in 1767—and here they were again.

This was the first year the legislators put Ward up for the Council. But he had already built a reputation in the House for being one of the sternest rural voices against Parliament’s new laws. In 1766 Gov. Bernard had “superseded” Ward’s commission as a militia colonel. And on this Election Day Ward took the place that Hutchinson had expected to win.

Finally, there was Hancock, by far the youngest of the new potential Councilors. He had entered politics only three years before as a Boston selectman. He had served as a town representative as well since 1766. And he had proven to be another vocal opponent of the royal party.

In sum, Gov. Bernard had little reason to accept any of those men on the Council. But as a bit of a surprise, on 26 May he approved one: Samuel Dexter. In a letter to the Earl of Hillsborough (available through the Colonial Society of Massachusetts’s invaluable website), Bernard explained: “I accepted one whom I had negatived before, having Reason to think he was tired of his Party.”

As it turned out, Dexter remained a moderate Whig. He usually voted against the royal governor. Looking back on his legislative career in 1795, he wrote two letters to the Rev. Jeremy Belknap which are valuable sources on the debate over the slave trade and slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts.

However, Dexter didn’t agree with the most radical Whig actions, worrying about attacking the British military in 1775. A few months after the war started, he quit the Council and moved back to his home colony of Connecticut because people were calling him a “Royalist.” Later he lived in Weston and Mendon, but he never reentered politics.

“Remarks, injurious to the Reputation of General Ward”

Yesterday I described how a sixteen-year-old letter from George Washington was published in 1792, showing the public some less than flattering comments on Artemas Ward, his predecessor as head of the American army outside Boston.

At the time, both Washington and Ward were holding federal office in Philadelphia, the first as President and the second as a Representative from Massachusetts. Awkward.

How did Ward react to that revelation? I think we can be sure that he confronted Washington about the letter because multiple people in the nineteenth century described him doing so. But we can’t be sure of how that confrontation really went because none of those descriptions was first-hand. The two men probably had a frosty exchange of words, of the sort that might have sent younger men to the dueling field, but they were discreet enough to keep their disagreement to themselves.

Here are the three surviving versions of what happened. The first came from a letter that Christopher Gore, then a former governor of Massachusetts, wrote to Ward’s son on 22 Jan 1819:

In conversation with our late Friend Samuel Dexter, and not many months before his Death, He mentioned to me, that your Father, who was a Representative in Congress, at the same time with himself, invariably attended President Washington’s Levees, in Philadelphia, and as invariably declined the President’s Invitation to Dinner, which He occasionally received during the Sessions.

This conduct, on the part of General Ward, was owing, as He Mr Dexter conceived, to a Letter published in the early part of the revolutionary war, which contained Remarks, injurious to the Reputation of General Ward, and purported to have been written by General Washington. On the subject of this Letter perfect Silence was observed by General Washington, until He had retired from public Life, and he had declined any further Election to the Supreme Magistracy of the Union.

He then wrote to General Ward, declaring to Him, in the most explicit Language, that He did not write the Letter, nor ever knew of it until its Publication in the Newspapers. He apologized, at the same time, for not having done this act before, which He considered equally due to General Ward & to Himself, from a Resolution that He judged prudent to adopt at the Commencement of the War, in Respect to every Publication that sought to embroil Him with the Officers civil or military of the U. States.

This Letter at the same Time expressed, in unequivocal Terms, the highest Regard for the character & Conduct of General Ward, in all the Departments of public Duty, in which He had acted. Genl. Washington further stated, that, although He had refrained from having written, or spoken on this Subject, He had always Kept among his Papers a Certificate of like Purport with the Communication then made, to be used in case of his Death, before the Circumstances of his Life prevented his doing what He had then done.
Having inferred from some Conversation with you, that this Fact was unknown, I have taken the Liberty to relate it precisely, according to my Recollection, as I had it from Mr Dexter.

No such letter or certificate survives in either the Ward papers or the Washington papers.

The second comes from the Reminiscences of the Reverend George Allen, published soon after his death in 1883:

Ward was a man of incorruptible integrity. Of his bravery there is no question, although Washington accused him of cowardice in leaving the service before Boston. Benjamin Stone, the first preceptor of Leicester Academy [and a correspondent of Ward who died in 1832], gave me the following account of Ward’s misunderstanding with Washington. Soon after the establishment of the Government at New York, Ward, then a member of Congress, came into possession of a letter written by Washington, in which the offensive charge was made. He immediately proceeded to the President’s house, placed the paper before him, and asked him if he was the author of it. Washington looked at the letter and made no reply. Ward said, “I should think that the man who was base enough to write that, would be base enough to deny it,” and abruptly took his leave.

And the third is from the not-always-reliable local historian Samuel A. Drake in Historic Fields and Mansions of Middlesex (1874):

It is well known that Washington spoke of the resignation of General Ward, after the evacuation of Boston, in a manner , approaching contempt. His observations, then confidentially made, about some of the other generals, were not calculated to flatter their amour propre or that of their descendants. It is said that General Ward, learning long afterwards the remark that had been applied to him, accompanied by a friend, waited on his old chief at New York, and asked him if it was true that he had used such language. The President replied that he did not know, but that he kept copies of all his letters, and would take an early opportunity of examining them. Accordingly, at the next session of Congress (of which General Ward was a member), he again called with his friend, and was informed by the President that he had really written as alleged. Ward then said, “Sir, you are no gentleman” and turning on his heel quitted the room.

Drake offered no source for who told this story.

If I had to guess, I’d say Ward did confront Washington privately, one senior gentleman to another, and told him what he wrote in 1776 was rude and hurtful. Washington, knowing that was correct, did not argue. Whether he later wrote a letter or certificate attesting to Ward’s good qualities but never sent it seems less likely; Washington preferred to let things lie.

The two men remained distant colleagues. Ward, despite being older and suffering from paralytic strokes, outlived Washington by ten months.

How to Join the Massachusetts Army

On 5 May 1775, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress decided how militiamen would sign up for longer service in its army:

Resolved, that all officers & soldiers of the Massachusetts army now raising for the defence & security of the rights and liberties of this and our sister colonies in america, shall each & every of them excepting only the the General Officers repeat and take the folowing Oath: (viz)

I, A B, swear, I will truly & faithfully serve in the Massachusetts army, to which I belong, for the defence and security of the estates, lives and liberties of the good people of this & the sister colonies in america, in opposition to ministerial tyrany by which they are or may be oppressed, and to all other enemies & opposers whatsoever; that I will adhere to the rules & regulations of sd. army, observe & obey the generals & other officers set over me; and disclose and make known to said officers all traiterous conspiraces, attempts and designs whatsoever which I shall know to be made against said army or any of the english american colonies, so help me God

This text came from a document in the Massachusetts Archives and was published in a volume of the state’s Acts and Resolves in 1886. The text published in The Journals of Each Provincial Congress of Massachusetts in 1838 has the same words but regularized spelling and punctuation.

The congress left generals out of that oath since they would have no superior officers to answer to. It took another twelve days, and a suggestion that Gen. Artemas Ward really ought to have a commission, for the body to come up with an oath for those commanders:

Resolved, That the general officers of the Massachusetts army, now raising for the defence and security of the rights and liberties of this and our sister colonies in America, shall each and every of them repeat, take, and subscribe the following oath, to be administered by viz.:

I, A. B., do solemnly swear, that, as a general officer in the Massachusetts army, I will well and faithfully execute the office of a general, to which I have been appointed, according to my best abilities, in defence and for the security of the estates, lives, and liberties of the good people of this and the sister colonies in America, in opposition to ministerial tyranny, by which they are or may be oppressed, and to all other enemies and opposers whatsoever; that I will adhere to the rules and regulations of said army, established by the Congress of the colony of the Massachusetts Bay, observe and obey the resolutions and orders which are or shall be passed by said Congress, or any future congress, or house of representatives, or legislative body of said colony, and such committees as shall be by them authorized for that purpose; and that I will disclose and make known to the authority aforesaid, all traitorous conspiracies, attempts and designs whatsoever, which I shall know to be made, or have reason to suspect are making, against the army, or any of the English American colonies.

That text comes from the printed Journals of Each Provincial Congress. It didn’t conclude with “so help me God,” the only one of the three oaths the congress dictated that didn’t contain that formula. Whether that was an oversight or a significant decision is unclear.

The congress took another two days to finish Ward’s commission. A biographer of James Sullivan stated that he drafted the document, and the other two members of the committee never had biographers to dispute that. On 20 May Samuel Dexter administered the oath to Gen. Ward, and Dr. Joseph Warren as president of the congress delivered the commission. It’s an impressive-looking document.

The Legend of the Long Room Club

Yesterday I quoted Samuel A. Drake’s 1873 description of the “Long Room Club” of pre-Revolutionary Boston and asked what was missing.

My answer is that Drake didn’t mention any source(s) for his information. He stated that a hundred years earlier some men met regularly in a large room over the Edes and Gill print shop, and readers had to take his word for that. Many authors did; the “Long Room Club” became a staple of descriptions of pre-Revolutionary Boston, and many books repeated Drake’s list of members. Repetition gave the statement the air of unimpeachable authority. I accepted it until a few years ago when Ben Carp asked me if I’d found any contemporaneous support.

So far as we could tell, no source before Drake had ever mentioned the “Long Room Club.” No contemporaneous document describes the group. A 1772 entry in John Adams’s diary shows that there was a room above the print shop. But a big room? With regular meetings of a club with a name? And those particular members? Drake’s statement was the only support for that idea.

We also have an account from Benjamin Edes’s son Peter describing a secret gathering before the Tea Party in his father’s house, not in the print shop. Under the influence of the “Long Room Club” meme, some authors shifted that gathering to the print shop.

Also missing from Samuel A. Drake’s description are the names of William Molineux and Dr. Thomas Young. All the usual, well-remembered suspects are listed: Samuel Adams, John Hancock, James Otis, Dr. Joseph Warren, Dr. Benjamin Church, the Cooper brothers, Josiah Quincy, Paul Revere, & al. But contemporaneous documents tell us that Molineux and Young were Boston’s most important crowd leaders of the late 1760s and early 1770s. Both men were gone by the end of 1774—Molineux dead and Young to the south. Both were radical and religiously unorthodox. As a result, nineteenth-century Bostonians didn’t remember them so well.

Drake’s “Long Room Club” list includes some names that don’t show up in many other lists of Boston Whig leaders, some from out of town and others a generation younger than the men listed above:

• Samuel Dexter (1726-1810) was an officeholder from Dedham, not visible in Boston and not among the province’s active Whigs. (His grandson had the same name, and would be a big politician in the early republic, but was only fourteen years old when the war began.)
  
• Thomas Fleet (1732-1797) printed the Boston Evening-Post with his brother John; they were known for their “impartiality,” as Isaiah Thomas wrote, rather than their political activism.
• Samuel Phillips (1752-1802) was a politician from Andover and is best remembered for founding the academy there during the war.
  
• John Winslow (1753-1819) was a young businessman who became prominent in federal Boston and was a big source of information about Bunker Hill.
  
• Thomas Melvill (1751-1832) was another young merchant, a Tea Party participant and official in post-Revolutionary Boston.

Those men don’t seem to have been part of the innermost circle of Boston Whigs at all. Rather, those were names that Bostonians of the early or mid-1800s probably recalled as connected in some way to Revolutionary times.

As for the “Long Room,” I suspect Samuel A. Drake or his informants might have gotten the Edes and Gill print shop mixed up with the Green Dragon Tavern. Taverns did often have long rooms for banquets and other meetings, and we know that the Green Dragon, which the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons had bought and turned into their headquarters, was one of the places where Revere convened his “committee of observation” shortly before the war.

Another possible root of the meme is Thomas Dawes’s garret, as described back here. Dawes was another name on Drake’s list, not as prominent in Revolutionary politics as the other men but definitely part of town politics before and after the war. But either way, the “Long Room Club” story seems so poorly sourced and probably garbled that I no longer think it’s reliable at all. (And now I have to go back to all the early Boston 1775 postings that referred to that group and update them.)