“Crying most pitifully all exceeping one”

This is a portrait of Mary Hubbard (1734–1808) painted by John Singleton Copley about 1764 and now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.

According to the institute, Hubbard’s “pose, gown, and background were precisely copied from a British engraving of a noblewoman, yet Copley distinguished the work as his own by capturing the figure’s individual features as well as the surfaces and colors of the luxurious fabrics.”

Mary Greene had married Daniel Hubbard (1736–1796) in 1757. Their mothers were first cousins. What’s more, her widowed father had married his widowed mother in 1744. That was one way mercantile families retained their money.

The Hubbards were Loyalists, particularly invested in importing sugar from the slave-labor plantations in Demarara. Daniel Hubbard signed the merchants’ addresses to the last royal governors, and the family remained in town during the siege. 

On 18 June 1775, Mary Hubbard wrote this description of the the Battle of Bunker Hill to her half-brother, David Greene (1749–1812):

once more at my Pen I can scarcely compose myself enough for any thing nor will you wonder when you know the situation we are in at present

Yesterday another Battle fought Charlestown the Scene of action they began early in the Morning & continued all day fighting. in the afternoon they set fire to the town & it is now wholy laid in ashes we could view this Melancholy sight from the top of our house

one poor Man went on the top of the meeting house to see the Battle was not able to git down again but perished in the flames.

about five in the afternoon they began to send home their wounded here my dear Brother was a Scene of woe indeed to see such numbers as pass’d by must have moved the hardest heart, judge then the fealings of your Sister, some without Noses some with but one Eye Broken legs & arms some limping along scarcely able to reach the Hospital, while others ware brought in Waggons, Chaise, Coaches, Sedans, & beds on mens Shoulders

the poor Women wringing their hands & crying most pitifully all exceeping one who on seeing her Husband in a cart badly wounded vou’d revenge went of but soon return’d compleatly Equip’t with her gun on her Shoulder her Knapsack at her back march’d down the street & left the poor Husband to try how many she could send along to tell he was comeing.

there is a vast Number of our Men killd & wound a great many Oficers two are sent to their long homes amongst the rest one fine looking Man much about your age who stopt against our windows to have his leg which was sliping moved a little he lived till this morning the poor fellow came a shore but yesterday or the day before, Perhaps his Mothers darling & his Fathers Joy cut of in the midst of his days his Sisters two if he had any must weep his untimely fate

hope it will never be my lot to have any of my near connections follow the Army.

Major [John] Pitcarn & Mr. Gore* both dead with many more that I dont know. we cannot yet learn how many of the enemy are kill’d, think it likely Mr. Hubbard who I supose will give you a particular account of the Battle will be able to write you word, to his Letter I refer you.

* have since heard Mr. Gore is a live

I don’t know who “Mr. Gore” is, not seeing such a British officer on the list of wounded. Hubbard wrote as if that man had been in the battle and thus not from the civilian family of Gores I’ve studied. (Samuel Gore was arrested after the battle for cracking a joke about the British deaths.)

The Hubbards didn’t evacuate Boston with the British military. Daniel kept at his business, and in 1792 was one of the founders of the Union Bank. He died on St. Croix during a voyage back from Demarara in 1796.

Mary Hubbard’s letter was first published by the Charlestown historian Richard Frothingham in 1876 and then as transcribed here in the D.A.R.’s American Monthly Magazine in 1894.

(The correspondent who sent the text to the magazine was Anita Newcomb McGee, a military doctor in the Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese Wars.)

Online Talk about Henry Pelham and His Map, 15 Jan.

On Wednesday, 15 January, the National Parks of Boston, in partnership with the Boston Public Library, will present a virtual lecture on the topic “Mapping a City Under Siege: Henry Pelham.”

The event description says:

In 1775, Henry Pelham, aspiring artist and half-brother of the famed John Singleton Copley, found himself inside a city under siege. A loyalist with ample time and nowhere to go, Pelham gained permission from the British military to map the war developing around him. Though many other engineers mapped Boston in 1775 and 1776, Pelham’s artistic eye and intimate loyalist connections resulted in something unparalleled in how it depicts the landscape of the first chapter of a civil war. Today, his work is immensely valuable in helping us understand and reconstruct a Boston under siege 250 years ago.

The N.P.S. ethos apparently precludes naming who on the interpretive staff will speak about this map, but of course the agency has high standards for accuracy.

This Zoom program begins at 6:00 P.M. Anyone who registers can tune in for free.

For more on places that appear Henry Pelham’s map of Boston, and how they appear today, check out the sunny video I made with Lee Wright of The History List.

To tie this event together with my talk at Gore Place on Sunday, in the summer of 1788 the painter and paint merchant Samuel Gore was advertising:

A few elegant Plans of Boston, and its environs, including Milton, Dorchester, Roxbury, Brookline, Cambridge, Medford, Charlestown, parts of Malden and Chelsea, with the military works constructed in those places, in the years 1775 and 76, by Mr. H. PELHAM.

That was shortly after Samuel’s father John Gore had returned from Loyalist exile, probably bringing the first copies of Pelham’s siege map to be sold in Boston. The Gore and Copley/Pelham families had done business before the war, and they did business after the war, too.

“Growing Up in the Gore Family” in Waltham, 19 Jan.

On Sunday, 19 January, I’ll speak at Gore Place in Waltham on “Growing Up in the Gore Family: Class and Conflict in Revolutionary Boston.”

That estate was built by Christopher and Rebecca-Payne Gore in the early republic after they returned from a diplomatic mission. Christopher had made his fortune as an early corporate lawyer, setting up some of the region’s first large industrial companies.

Among those companies was a glass factory co-owned by Christopher’s older brother Samuel and their twice-over brother-in-law Jonathan Hunewell. That factory supplied the glass for the mansion’s first windows.

But I’m going to talk about the American Revolution before America’s Industrial Revolution. As the event description says:

Christopher Gore grew up in a family on the verge of entering Boston’s genteel class. The Gores were active in the Revolutionary resistance—organizing protests at Liberty Tree, hosting spinning bees for Daughters of Liberty, and even being hurt in a riot before the Boston Massacre. But as that conflict heated up, Christopher’s father chose to side with the royal government and left America in 1776. This talk explores the difficult choices that one family worked through.

If that sounds staid, rest assured there’s bloodshed, bigamy, effigies, and weapons theft along the way.

This event is scheduled to start at 3:00 P.M. After we’re done with questions, attendees will have a chance to walk through the mansion. The cost is $10, free to Gore Place members and through Card to Culture. Reserve tickets through this link.

“A youth, son to Captain John Gore”

The older boy wounded by Ebenezer Richardson’s shot on 22 Feb 1770 was nineteen-year-old Samuel Gore.

He appears here in his early-1750s portrait by John Singleton Copley, a detail from a painting now at Winterthur. Of course, this when Sammy was still a toddler and Copley was still developing his technique.

In contrast to Christopher Seider, a servant born to poor German immigrant parents, Sammy Gore came from an old New England Puritan family that was rising swiftly in society. The portrait of the kids was one sign of that social ambition, even if the young artist might have done it for practice or in barter for paints.

Sammy’s father John Gore had started as a decorative painter. Specializing in heraldic designs, he developed an upper-class clientele and began to move into that class himself—as a paint merchant, a militia officer, and eventually an Overseer of the Poor, one of the most respected town offices. By 1770 he was considered a gentleman.

Capt. John Gore’s oldest child, Frances, married Thomas Crafts, Jr., another decorative painter. (I suspect he was one of Gore’s early apprentices, but I can’t confirm that.) Crafts became an active member of the “Loyall Nine” who organized the first anti-Stamp Act protests and looked after Liberty Tree. He, too, was rising through militia service and town offices.

Capt. Gore’s first son, also named John, became a dry goods merchant. He married the niece of the Rev. Henry Caner, minister of King’s Chapel. Both John, Jr., and Samuel had tried schooling at the South Latin School, which would have prepared them for Harvard, but decided to drop out for more practical education. Their little brother Christopher (Kit), however, was sailing through the Latin School curriculum.

In August 1769, Capt. Gore, his son John, and his son-in-law Crafts all dined with the Sons of Liberty at Lemuel Robinson’s tavern in Dorchester, as described here. At the time John, Jr., advertised that he was sticking to the non-importation agreement in the cloth he sold from his shop.

Of course, it was hard for a paint merchant to take that stance and stay in business—the Townshend Act put a tariff on painter’s colors. Sammy, training under his father in decorative painting, had a close-up look at that situation. In late January 1770, the Boston Chronicle published Customs house documents revealing that Capt. Gore had paid duties on “4 barrels Painters colours” that had arrived on the Abigail and more goods that had later come on the Thomas.

That revelation might have motivated the family to demonstrate their commitment to non-importation. In the third week of February, the Gores—more probably, Frances Gore and her daughters and perhaps daughters-in-law—hosted a spinning bee at their house on Queen Street. This was a social occasion, but it also showed the women’s support for local manufacturing.

Most spinning bees took place in rural towns, usually in ministers’ houses, with the host accepting the gift of the spun yarn to benefit the poor. Of ten spinning bees that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich counted in and around Boston in 1766-70, the Gores’ was one of only two not in a minister’s home.

Early in its local news roundup, the 26 Feb 1770 Boston Gazette put a strong political spin on the Gores’ event:

One Day last Week a Number of Patriot Ladies met at the House of John Gore, Esq; of this Town, when their Industry at the Spinning Wheel was at least equal to any Instance recorded in our Paper.

It is principally owing to the indefatigable Pains of Mr. William Mollineux; and it will be said to his lasting Honor, that the laudable Practice of Spinning is almost universally in Vogue among the Female Children of this Town; whereby they are not only useful to the Community, but the poorer Sort are able in some Measure to assist their Parents in getting a Livelihood—

The Use of the Spinning-Wheel is now encouraged, and the pernicious Practice of Tea-drinking equally discountenanced, by all the Ladies of this Town, excepting those whose Husbands are Tories and Friends to the American Revenue-Acts; and a few Ladies who are Tories themselves.

By the time that item was published, Sammy Gore had made his own political statement about non-importation by showing up outside Ebenezer Richardson’s house on 22 February. We don’t know if he was among the boys who organized the demonstrations at Theophilus Lillie’s shop or if he threw garbage and rocks at Richardson’s house. But we do know Sammy Gore was close enough to the front of the crowd to be struck by pellets from Richardson’s gun.

The Boston Gazette stated, “A youth, son to Captain John Gore, was also wounded in one of his hands and in both his thighs.” The Boston Evening-Post reported:

Dr. [Joseph] Warren likewise cut two slugs out of young Mr. Gore’s thighs, but pronounced him in no danger of death, though in all probability he will lose the use of the right forefinger, by the wound received there, much important to a youth of his dexterity in drawing and painting.

As it turned out, Samuel Gore would enjoy a long and healthy career as a painter and manufacturer. In the 1830s a Boston barber recalled that he would show young people his scarred fingers and describe how he’d been wounded in the Revolution “with some relish.”

(For more about Samuel Gore’s Revolutionary activities and reminiscences, see The Road to Concord.)

TOMORROW: A grand funeral.

“Fashioning the New England Family” in Boston

The “Fashioning the New England Family” exhibit will be on display at the Massachusetts Historical Society through 6 April. It’s well worth a visit, especially because it’s free.

The webpage on the exhibit explains:

Fashioning the New England Family explores the ways in which the multiple meanings of fashion and fashionable goods are reflected in patterns of consumption and refashioning, recycling, and retaining favorite family pieces. Many of the items that will be featured have been out of sight, having never been exhibited for the public or seen in living memory. . . .

For the public, it is an opportunity to view in detail painstaking craftsmanship, discover how examples of material culture relate to significant moments in our history, and learn how garments were used as political statements, projecting an individual’s religion, loyalties, and social status.

The garments on display range from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The ways they’re displayed are often as interesting as the clothing itself. In a couple of cases, beside the garment is a portrait of its owner wearing it. One quilted petticoat is a recreation by Colonial Williamsburg tailors based on a pattern copied from the original—which was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. Tools show how clothing was made and repaired. Examples highlight how garments were remade or their fabrics reused.

The exhibit also features fashionable accessories, such as jewelry, shoes, and Abigail Adams’s pocket. One case is devoted to a rare example of a wig, wig case, powder, and related utensils. I was particularly struck by a walking stick that belonged to Thomas Hancock, shown here; I hadn’t known “fist canes” were a thing.

Given the expense of fashionable, high-quality clothing; the resources necessary to preserve those goods; and the Massachusetts Historical Society’s traditional supporters, upper-class fashion dominates the exhibit. But of course I looked for traces of “my guys,” the striving mechanics on the front line of pre-Revolutionary protests and military preparations, as discussed in The Road to Concord. Many of those men made it into the genteel class, but they struggled to get in and to solidify that status. Understanding fashion helped.

One item from “my guys” is shown at top: a hatchment that a young woman in the Pierpont family embroidered following the design of heraldic painters John and Samuel Gore. And there’s a whole display case devoted to objects from the family of William Dawes. He was a fashion icon in colonial Boston—the first time Dawes’s name appeared in the newspapers, it was because he got married in a suit of Massachusetts-woven cloth. That suit doesn’t survive, but the display includes homespun cloth from the Dawes family earlier in the century, a silk muff, bags and purses, and a kidskin bag that Dawes used to hold legal papers when he died in 1799.

For folks who can’t visit the exhibit before April, there’s also a Fashioning the New England Family book by guest curator Kimberly S. Alexander.

Barbier at Massachusetts State House, 7 Mar.

On Wednesday, 7 March, the State Library of Massachusetts will host a book talk and signing by Brooke Barbier, author of Boston in the American Revolution: A Town versus an Empire.

That publisher explains:

In 1764, a small town in the British colony of Massachusetts ignited a bold rebellion. When Great Britain levied the Sugar Act on its American colonies, Parliament was not prepared for Boston s backlash. For the next decade, Loyalists and rebels harried one another as both sides revolted and betrayed, punished and murdered. But the rebel leaders were not quite the heroes we consider them today. Samuel Adams and John Hancock were reluctant allies. Paul Revere couldn’t recognize a traitor in his own inner circle. And George Washington dismissed the efforts of the Massachusetts rebels as unimportant.

With a helpful guide to the very sites where the events unfolded, historian Brooke Barbier seeks the truth behind the myths. Barbier tells the story of how a city radicalized itself against the world s most powerful empire and helped found the United States of America.

Barbier is the founder of Ye Olde Tavern Tours, offering “spirited tours of the Freedom Trail.” She earned her Ph.D. in American History at Boston College. She’s the only person I know as excited about the Gore family of Boston as I am. (In The Road to Concord, I focused on the young men of the Revolutionary years; in her dissertation, she explored the next generation of women constructing their place in the early republic.)

This lunchtime event will start at noon in Room 341 of the Massachusetts State House. Register in advance through this page. Folks who can’t make this occasion can hear Barbier talk about the stories in her book with the hosts of the HUB History podcast here.

Gore Place’s Open Carriage House, 14 June

On Sunday, 14 June, Gore Place in Waltham is inviting the public to view its newly renovated (and recently relocated) carriage house.

This structure dates to 1793, thus making it even older than the brick mansion that defines the Gore Place estate.

Christopher and Rebecca Gore bought that property starting in 1789, then tore down the existing house and had their first mansion and outbuildings erected in 1793. After their wooden house burned while they were in Europe in 1799, they replaced it with the grander, more modern brick mansion in 1806.

The carriage house strikes me as particularly symbolic given Christopher Gore’s rise to wealth. His father, John Gore, was a decorative painter in pre-Revolutionary Boston. The Gore shop specialized in heraldic devices, so the elder Gore and his apprentices and at least one son, Samuel, no doubt painted coats of arms on richer men’s carriages. In particular, the Gores were close to Adino Paddock, a coachmaker with a large workshop opposite the Granary Burying-Ground, and Paddock’s customers included John Hancock.

After a Harvard education, training in the law, and lucrative investments in Continental bonds and many of Massachusetts’s earliest corporations, Christopher Gore could afford a grand carriage himself. His equipage even became a campaign issue when he ran for governor in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

In a 1790 letter to Samuel Adams, John Adams used the Gores as one of four examples of Boston families that had risen from the ranks of mechanics into genteel status as a “natural aristocracy.” Rebecca Gore’s family, the Paynes, was another.

The Gore Place open house, or open carriage house, is scheduled to take place from 3:00 to 5:00 P.M. It is free, and light refreshments will be served. To know about how many people to expect, the site asks visitors to reserve a space through goreplace@goreplace.org.

Dispatch from the Green Dragon

I’m typing this in a coffee house in Carlsbad, California. But not just any coffee house—the one attached to the Green Dragon Tavern and Museum.

I reported on the plans for this complex and its opening last year. So when I made plans for a convention in San Diego, I included time to drive forty minutes up the coast to south Carlsbad and check it out for myself.

I went thinking I’d find something fairly kitschy: a replica of the original Green Dragon (as depicted by John Johnson) tacked onto a California strip mall.

And in fact the site is in an area of strip malls. Next door is a car wash with a lovely Southwestern tile roof, as seen in the background of this photo. The first thing one sees getting off that exit from I-5 is a giant windmill attached to a motel.

But the Green Dragon Tavern and Museum is a more extensive and substantive enterprise than I’d expected. In size, it’s not just part of a strip mall—it’s an entire strip mall’s worth of structures. The part made to look like the original tavern is the main restaurant dining room, two levels high, and the coffee shop and bookstore. On the far side are a series of meeting rooms for special dinners.

And in between is a museum devoted to the owner’s interests in New England history, particularly the Revolution but starting in Plymouth Colony and including the Salem Witch Trials. The displays include replicas of significant documents and many original artifacts bearing the signatures of famous historical figures: legal documents signed by Samuel Sewall, Thomas Hutchinson, John Adams, and Robert Treat Paine, for example.

Throughout the building are framed copies of early American newspapers, mostly from the last two decades of the eighteenth century. And by throughout, I mean throughout. The hall to one set of restrooms, for example, includes a 1783 issue of the Providence Gazette and two issues of Benjamin Russell’s Columbian Centinel from the early 1790s. In another issue of the Centinel I spotted a big advertisement from Samuel Gore, one of “my guys.”

Amidst those genuine period documents are reproductions of nineteenth-century popular art, posters of the most famous Founders, postcard photographs of national monuments, and so on. So there’s definitely the potential for hagiographic kitsch. But the quotations on those Founder posters all have citations to particular documents (which is more than some folks can provide). There’s a display clearly explaining the eighteenth-century long s to visitors. Some of the labels discuss how American historiography or commemoration has changed over time.

I quibble with some of the historical statements I see in the displays or literature. I don’t think of the Sons of Liberty as a “secret society” but rather an amorphous political label like “Tea Party” or “Occupy Movement.” I don’t think “Paul Revere departed the Green Dragon Tavern for his famous ride,” though he definitely spent a lot of time there. But for me the list of quibbles is small.

The bookstore attached to the coffee shop includes a lot of popular titles for both kids and adults, focusing mostly on the Founders (and including some I think are flawed). However, the selection includes ground-breaking biographies from academics, including Woody Holton on Abigail Adams and Jill Lepore on Jane Mecom. And I can’t complain about any store carrying Reporting the Revolutionary War, with two essays by me.

The restaurant has wood paneling and a fireplace, but it’s not trying to be a period site (at least at lunchtime). There are multiple televisions tuned to sports channels. The menu may have sandwiches named after Boston Revolutionaries, but they’re all California cuisine, heavy on the avocado.

Overall, the Green Dragon Tavern and Museum is a solid little private museum with a significant number of print artifacts to examine, particularly newspapers. In its emphasis on the most prominent Founders, their signatures, and genealogy, its sensibility is old-fashioned, but within that sensibility the standards are high. The site is a very short drive off I-5, so I feel confident recommending it to folks traveling between San Diego and Los Angeles and seeking a genuine taste of the Revolutionary Era (as well as California cuisine).

The First News of Christopher Seider’s Death

On Thursday, 22 Feb 1770, the Boston News-Letter contained this item in italics at the bottom of its local news:

This Instant we hear that one Richardson having attempted to destroy some Effigies in the North End, the Lads beat him off into his House, and broke his Windows, upon which he fired among them, mortally wounded one Boy, & slightly wounded two or three others. Richardson is now under Examination.

The issue of the Boston Chronicle dated 19-22 Feb 1770 closed its local news this way:

This forenoon, a boy of about 14 years of age, was mortally wounded, and two others slightly wounded by a shot from a musket, fired out of a house at the north end.—Two persons, who were in the house from whence the gun was fired, are now under examination at Faneuil Hall.

*** The Western Post not arrived at 2 o’Clock

The wounded lad, who would die later that afternoon, was Christopher Seider. He wasn’t fourteen, as the Loyalist Chronicle guessed, but only about eleven. His wound was indeed mortal, as both newspapers said. There was only one other person wounded, Samuel Gore, though a sailor named Robert Patterson complained that pieces of shot went through his pants.

Because Ebenezer Richardson shot at the boys mobbing his house on Thursday, one of the two days when newspapers were printed in Boston, this is a rare example of being able to read a local news story written as it broke.

Furthermore, this story tells us a couple of things about the newspapers themselves. The Chronicle dated 19-22 February was published at the end of that stretch; in chronological indexes that issue’s often pegged to the start date. Furthermore, the Chronicle’s note that the printer was still waiting for mail at 2:00 show that newspapers were printed in the early afternoon of the date on their front pages. They weren’t ready first thing in the morning, at least these editions.

At the time, the Chronicle was being supported by the Customs service with stationery orders, advertising, and leaks. And it appears the newspaper’s printer, then John Fleeming, reciprocated by not mentioning Richardson even by last name: he was a Customs employee, and a notorious one.

“Gossiping about the Gores” Now Online!

In January, I had the honor of speaking at Old South Meeting House in a series of lunchtime lectures on the Loyalists of the Revolution. My talk was “Gossiping about the Gores,” telling the stories of the family of decorative painter and paint merchant John Gore and his many children.

After participating in political protests against Parliament’s new taxes in the 1760s, John Gore sided with the Crown in 1774. As a result, he sailed away with the British military in 1776. But his wife and children stayed behind; in fact, several of the younger generation were very active Patriots. In addition to that political division, the family also had to deal with business challenges, riots, sudden death, stolen cannons, and at least one dicey marriage. Intrigued?

My talk has now been archived in audio form at the WGBH Forum. The videotape ran into technical problems, I understand, but really you didn’t miss anything. In fact, I can offer much better visuals than me talking.

Above is part of John Singleton Copley’s picture of the Gore children in the mid-1750s; John, Jr., is on the left, and Samuel on the right. The full image, including two older sisters, appears on Flickr and The Atheneum, and the original is at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware.

Below is part of the handout I prepared for the talk and alluded to a few times. It charts out John and Frances Gore’s many children and their spouses. Clicking on the image should take you to a larger version. Download and follow along!

J. L. Bell Speaks on the Gores, Old South, 22 Jan

This Thursday, 22 January, I’ll be speaking on Revolutionary Boston at Old South Meeting House. My talk is part of this month’s “Middays at the Meeting House” series on Loyalists. These events run from 12:15 P.M. to 1:00, so bring your lunch and your questions. The admission is free for Old South members, $5 for others.

Depending on which brochure you look at, my talk is titled “The Gores: One Family Divided” or “Gossiping about the Gores.” Whichever turns out to be official, I won’t be able to stay away from the juicy gossip. This is, after all, a family whose members:

• secretly helped to organize America’s first public protests against the Stamp Act.
• hosted a spinning bee for women objecting to new Customs regulations.
  
• suffered a wound in a riot eleven days before the Boston Massacre.
• patrolled the docks before the Boston Tea Party—and on that dramatic night.
  
• snuck cannons out of an armory under British army guard.
  
• were split by the war, with some family members going to Britain and others staying in Boston.
  
• included two sisters who married the same man, and one sister-in-law who married a married man.
  
• helped launch the Industrial Revolution in Massachusetts, and suffered a sudden bankruptcy.

The thumbnail picture here is John Singleton Copley’s portrait of the oldest four surviving Gore children in about 1755. From left, they are Frances, Elizabeth, John, and Samuel (in the pink). The painting is now in the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, and this snapshot comes from Jay Glenn’s Flickr site.

The Autopsy of Christopher Seider

This week Boston 1775 will take the theme of CSI: Colonial Boston. I could probably come up with a few clever allusions to the CSI television shows if I’d watched more than a snippet of them, but you’ll have to provide those parallels yourselves. I’ll just quote documents about investigating dead bodies in Revolutionary Massachusetts.

First up, little Christopher Seider, died on 22 Feb 1770 in the North End, as reported in the newspapers:

soon after the child’s decease his body was opened by Dr. [Joseph] Warren and others and in it were found eleven shot or plugs, about the bigness of large peas; one of which pierced his breast about an inch and one-half above the midriff and passing clear through the lobe of the lungs, lodged in his back.

This, three of the surgeons deposed before the Jury of Inquest, was the cause of his death; on which they brought in their verdict, wilful murder by [Ebenezer] Richardson. The right hand of the boy was cruelly torn, whence it seems to have been across his breast and to have deadened the force of the shot, which might otherwise have pierced the stomach.

Dr. Warren likewise cut two slugs out of young Mr. [Samuel] Gore’s thighs, but pronounced him in no danger of death, though in all probability he will lose the use of the right forefinger, by the wound received there, much important to a youth of his dexterity in drawing and painting.

Good news: young Gore did not lose the use of his hand—at least not enough to prevent him from participating in the Boston Tea Party of 1773 and stealing two cannon from a gunhouse under redcoat guard in 1774. He had a long career as a decorative painter, paint importer, and glass factory owner in the early republic. Throughout his life Gore enjoyed showing off the scars on his fingers from where Richardson had shot him.

Pillars of the Brattle Street Meeting

In September 1775, Timothy Newell had to deal with an order from the governor to let a Presbyterian minister take over the Brattle Street Meeting-House, where he was deacon. But that was nothing compared to the threat he dodged 237 years ago today.

From Newell’s journal:

Colonel [Samuel] Birch of the Lighthorse Dragoons went to view our Meetinghouse which was destined for a Riding School for the Dragoons. It was designed to clear the floor, to put two feet of tan covered with horse dung to make it elastic.—But when it was considered that the Pillars must be taken away, which would bring down the roof, they altered their mind,—so that the Pillars saved us.

(But the dragoons still needed a place in besieged Boston to practice their riding over the winter.)

At some point, the British military did seize the Brattle Street Meeting-House, and converted the 1772 building into a barracks for soldiers. Newell’s diary doesn’t mention that event, oddly enough, but other sources say that he arranged with congregant John Gore to protect as much of the furniture as they could. The men “encased” the pulpit and those valuable pillars, and removed the pews to Gore’s nearby paint warehouse. Perhaps Newell was too busy with that work to write it down.

John Gore was a militia captain and Overseer of the Poor who had been active in the Patriot movement in 1769-70, but in 1774 he chose to support the royal governors. He evacuated Boston with the British army in March 1776, leaving most of his family behind. Gore’s eldest surviving son, Samuel, helped deliver the pews back to the church on Brattle Street, and eventually became a deacon there. John Gore returned to Boston in the late 1780s, after the war.

Arrests After the Battle of Bunker Hill

For the past two days I quoted responses to the Battle of Bunker Hill from people who were on their best behavior. But not everyone reacts to stress in such an admirable way. Merchant Isaac Smith, Sr. (shown here) described this fallout from the battle in a letter dated 30 July 1775, after leaving Boston for Salem:

Poor, harmless Shrimpton Hunt, standing by the door at the time of the engagement, was overheard saying he hoped our people would get the better of the others, was taken up and confined in gaol.

Sam. Gore, for calling over to his sister to come and see a funeral pass, was taken up and confined some time; and a person who came out by water yesterday says Jemmy Lovell is in close gaol or in the dungeon, but nobody can tell for what.

Hunt was a shopkeeper in his fifties, not active in politics. And is it possible to have a more harmless-sounding name than “Shrimpton”?

I presume painter Samuel Gore’s offense was referring to British soldiers, either on their way to the battlefield or on the way from it to the hospital, as a funeral procession. Despite his nasty joke, he was probably let out after a short time because his father was a Loyalist. The military authorities didn’t know the extent of Gore’s Patriot activities, and his father probably didn’t, either. In 1773 Gore had participated in the Boston Tea Party, and in 1774 he had helped remove the Boston militia artillery company’s cannons from an armory under redcoat guard.

Gore’s father left town with the British military in March 1776. Samuel stayed—and in April the Massachusetts Provincial Congress ordered his arrest, along with a lot of other men who had remained in town through the siege. He might not have gone to jail that time; one of the magistrates charged with arresting people was his brother-in-law, Thomas Crafts. But Gore might have the rare distinction of being arrested by both sides of the war.

James “Jemmy” Lovell was the usher (assistant teacher) at the South Latin School. He was an avid Patriot, delivering the town’s first official oration about the Boston Massacre in 1771. He thought about leaving to join the provincial army, but in May 1775 he wrote that “a most violent Diarhea, from being too long in a damp place, has confirm’d Doctr. [Joseph] Gardners advice to me not to go into the Trenches.”

Instead, Lovell remained in Boston, sending what seems to have been sensitive information to Dr. Joseph Warren. The British army found those papers on the doctor’s body after the battle. Lovell was locked up for the rest of the siege and taken to Nova Scotia in chains.

Boston's First Revolutionary Death, 237 Years Ago

For a couple of days I’ve been discussing how in early 1770 Boston was aboil with conflict over a “nonimportation” of goods from Britain to protest the Townshend duties. Most of the town supported this boycott, and Whigs were pressuring the handful of merchants and shopkeepers who refused to sign on.

Part of that pressure in early February were crowds of boys marching outside importers’ stores; these protests appeared every Thursday morning when there was no school. On 22 Feb 1770, these young Whigs focused their attention on small merchant Theophilus Lillie. They set up their “Pageantry” on Union Street: a hand pointing to his shop with the word IMPORTER, and an effigy of Lillie’s head on a pole.

Along came Ebenezer Richardson, a Customs service employee. As I described in a New England Ancestors article available online, Richardson had become notorious in his home town of Woburn for having impregnated his wife’s sister and letting blame fall on the town’s minister for several months. He then moved to Boston and made his living as a confidential informer, first for the Attorney General and then for the Customs service. When that work was exposed in the early 1760s, Richardson became even more unpopular, and started to work openly for Customs since no one else would employ him.

The Customs establishment opposed the nonimportation movement, and Richardson apparently took it upon himself to break up the boys’ protest of Lillie’s shop. First he tried to persuade two farmers in Boston for market day to knock down the carved head with their wagons. The drivers refused. Whig gentlemen watching the action laughed at Richardson’s efforts. He stomped off to his nearby home, shouting, “Perjury! Perjury!”

It’s unclear what Richardson was referring to, but, as the Boston Evening-Post reported, “The Boys on hearing the words began to gather round, and call him an informer.” Richardson and his wife Kezia (the same woman he had impregnated and eventually married years before) shooed them away. The boys said, “they would not, Kings high Way”—meaning they had every right to be on the street.

Richardson flourished a stick. The boys ran around “with the squeeling and noise they usually make on such occasion,” said the newspaper. The young mob, now numbering at least “60 or 70 Boys,” left Lillie’s shop and started pelting Richardson’s house with “Limon Peels,” witnesses later testified. The boys hit Kezia Richardson with an egg. Someone inside the house tossed out a brickbat, striking a sailor. He threw it back through a window.

A low-level Customs employee named George Wilmot came to the house and offered help. According to one of the Richardsons’ daughters, “Wilmot asked [my father] if he had any Gun.” Both men armed themselves with muskets.

Richardson came out his front door and yelled at the boys, “as sure as there was a G[od] in heaven, he’d blow a Lane thro ’em.” He “snapped” his gun—firing it with powder but no ball, like a blank shot. The boys scattered and came back again, no longer tossing “light rubbish of one kind or another” but throwing stones through windows.

Richardson reappeared with his musket at an upper window. The boys continued to throw rocks. Richardson fired his musket again. This time he had loaded it with buckshot pellets, “about the bigness of large peas.”

Some of those pellets sliced through the baggy pants of a sailor named Robert Patterson. A few pierced the right hand and thigh of a nineteen-year-old painter named Sammy Gore. Eleven pieces flew into the chest of Christopher Seider, a servant boy just about eleven years old, who was “stooping to take up a Stone.”

The wounded boys were taken into a nearby house. As the violence continued outside, Dr. Joseph Warren, Dr. Thomas Young, and other surgeons examined them. Christopher’s chest was gradually filling with blood. People brought his parents, poor German immigrants, from their little home at the far end of Boston Common. Clergymen came to pray with the family. Christopher Seider died around nine o’clock on the night of 22 February, the first death of Boston’s Revolutionary conflict.