“I went contentedly home & finishd my tea”

One of my favorite accounts of the Boston Tea Party comes from the merchant John Andrews.

He cultivated a sense of detached irony in his letters. So much so that he can come across as barely able to rouse himself and find out what was going on.

Andrews wrote this letter on 18 Dec 1773, more than a day after the event, so he had a chance to digest it and polish his observations.

This extract picks up Andrews’s account as ship-owner Francis Rotch has returned from Milton with the not-unexpected news that Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wouldn’t let the Dartmouth carry its load of tea back to London.

upon readg it, such prodigious shouts were made, that induced me, while drinkg tea at home to go out, & know the cause of it, the [Old South Meeting] house was so crowded could get no further than ye porch, where I found ye moderator [Samuel Phillips Savage], was just declaring the meetg to be dissolvd, which causd another general Shout, outdoors & in, of three cheers; what wth that, & the consequent noise of breaking up the meetng, you’d tho’t the inhabitants of the infernal regions had broke loose.

for my part, I went contentedly home & finishd my tea, but was soon informd what was going forward, but still not crediting it without ocular demonstration, I went & was satisfied–

they mustered I’m told upon Fort hill, to the number of about 200 & proceeded, 2 by 2 to Griffins wharfe, where [the ships captained by James] Hall, [James] Bruce and [Hezekiah] Coffin lay, each with 114 Chests of the ill-fated article on board, the two former with only that article, but ye lattr arriv’d at ye wfe only ye day before, was freighted with a large quantity of other goods, which they took the greatest care not to injure in the least, and before nine O Clock in ye eveng, every Chest, from on board the 3 vessells, was knocked to pieces and Flung over ye sides–

they say the actors were Indians from Naragansett, whether they were, or not, to a transient observer they appeard as Such, being cloathd in Blankets, wth their heads muffled & copper colord countenances, being each arm’d with a hatchet or axe or po [pair of] pistols, nor was their dialect different from what I conceive those geniueses to speak, as their jargon was uninteligible to all but themselves–

not the least insult was offerd to any person, save one Capt [Charles] Conner, a letter of horses in this place, not many years since immergd from dear Ireland who had ript ye lining of his coat & waistcoat under the arms, and watchg his oppoty had nearly filld ’em wth tea, but being detected, was handled pretty roughly, they not only Stript him of his cloaths, but gave him a coat of mud, wth a severe bruising into the bargain, & nothing but their utter aversion to make any disturbance prevented his being tard & featherd.

Conner was also mentioned (though not by name) in the Whig newspapers and in the Rev. Samuel Cooper’s report to Benjamin Franklin. Boston’s political leaders really wanted people to know the men who destroyed the tea (whoever they might be) were acting on principle and not for private gain.

(The depiction of the Tea Party above comes courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum, where I’m typing these words. It was engraved in 1856 by John Andrew, who I don’t think was any relation to the merchant.)

“I should not have chose this town for an Asylum”

On 17 June 1775, as I quoted yesterday, John Adams complained that five friends from Massachusetts hadn’t sent him any letters with news about the province since he’d left for the Second Continental Congress.

I decided to look into what those men did in the previous two months.

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper had fled from Boston on 9 April, halfway through Sunday services, wary that Gen. Thomas Gage might order his arrest. He settled in with Samuel P. Savage in Weston. By the end of the month Cooper had his wife, daughter, and clothing with him, but not his library or all his letters.

In early May, Cooper arranged to stand in as the minister in Groton. Or rather, since that town was far away and he liked being near the seat of Patriot power, he made deals with other ministers to go out and preach in Groton while he preached in their churches close by. For a while, at least, he could coast on his celebrity as Boston’s most silver-tongued minister and recycle his old sermons.

Prof. John Winthrop of Harvard College lived in Cambridge. As the king’s troops marched through town on 18–19 April, he and his wife Hannah fled for safety, first to the Fresh Pond area, then further the next day, fearing the redcoats would return.

Later Hannah Winthrop wrote to her friend Mercy Warren:

Thus with precipitancy were we driven to the town of Andover, following some of our acquaintance, five of us to be conveyd with one poor tired horse & Chaise. . . .

I should not have chose this town for an Asylum, being but 20 miles from Seaports where men of war & their Pirates are Stationed, but in being fixd here I see it is not in man to direct his steps. As you kindly enquire after our Situation, I must tell you it is Rural & romantically pleasing.

Back in Cambridge, militia companies arrived en masse, taking over the college buildings and larger mansions. Most of the townspeople left.

By mid-June, however, the Winthrops were back home, though only temporarily. The professor helped to pack up the Harvard College library and scientific equipment. College classes resumed in Concord in October, and the Winthrops settled there for the rest of the school year.

Adams’s list started with three lawyers, all from Boston. All also had ties of family or friendship to Loyalists, and that complicated their choices as the war broke out.

Benjamin Kent at some point got a pass out of Boston and, according to his profile in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, stayed with various friends in the countryside through the siege. Though he remained in the U.S. of A. through the war, in the mid-1780s he moved to Canada to spend his last years with his children.

William Tudor was just starting his legal career. He was also courting Delia Jarvis, a young lady from a Loyalist family. According to a family memoir, after the fighting started, Tudor tried to wrangle passes for himself, her, and her family from the Adm. Samuel Graves’s secretary, but that effort was fruitless.

On 12 May, Tudor “broke from Boston by the roundabout way of Point Sherly” in Chelsea (now Winthrop), leaving Delia and her family behind. He sought a position in the Patriot service. With John Adams championing him, Tudor became the Continental Army’s judge advocate general in the summer of 1775.

TOMORROW: The legend of Samuel Swift.

The Knowles Riot and the Boston Militia

In November 1747, the Royal Navy under Admiral Charles Knowles (c. 1704-1777, shown here) impressed some men in Boston. There was a war on—the War of Jenkins’ Ear or King George’s War—and the navy needed sailors to fight.

Impressment was widely unpopular in Massachusetts, though. Not only did sailors who hadn’t joined the Royal Navy prefer to keep it that way, but sea captains and merchants liked having experienced seamen to sail their ships. People felt there were laws or at least handshake agreements not to impress inhabitants of North America.

What’s more, Knowles’s impressment gangs grabbed some young men who weren’t even sailors, at least not full-time; they were carpenters living in Boston. On top of all that, there was still a man locked up in the Suffolk County jail for killing two locals in a fight over impressment in 1745.

The result was a huge riot, probably the worst popular unrest in Boston between the overthrow of Gov. Edmund Andros in 1692 and the Stamp Act protests of 1765. Yet this riot wasn’t simply destructive—the crowd had particular goals in mind.

As the merchant Samuel P. Savage wrote, this “Mob, or rather a body of Men arose, I believe with no other Motive, than barely to rescue if possible their Captivated Fr[ien]ds.” Savage’s substitution of a “body of Men” for “Mob” showed how he felt sympathy for their goals.

The crowd broke all the windows in the ground floor of the Town House, dragged a barge they thought belonged to the navy onto Boston Common and burned it, and detained a navy officer and local officials who had helped with the impressment.

Gov. William Shirley had opposed the impressment but still demanded peaceful deference to the Crown. He was able to hold off the crowd on 17 November with the help of other officials, including Thomas Hutchinson, then speaker of the Massachusetts house. But the people weren’t satisfied as long as the impressed men were still in naval custody. Crowds massed around the Town House and the Province House, Shirley’s official residence.

To pacify Boston, Shirley tried to call out the militia. As royal governor he was the legal commander-in-chief of that force. Years later Hutchinson wrote in his History of Massachusetts Bay:

The next day the governor ordered that, the military officers of Boston should cause their companies to be mustered and to appear in arms, and that a military watch should be kept the succeeding night, but the drummers were interrupted and the militia refused to appear. The governor did not think it for his honour to remain in town another night and privately withdrew to the castle.

Shirley had no other large law-enforcement force to call on—just a sheriff and a few deputies, plus some constables and watchmen who really answered to the town of Boston. Some of those officials were already intimidated by or sympathetic to the crowd. But the biggest problem for the governor was that Boston’s militia regiment consisted of the same men who were already marching in the streets, trying to help their neighbors.

Of course, the makeup of the militia wasn’t a problem for the people of Massachusetts when they were so united. Without a standing army or other armed force carrying out the orders of the royal authorities, they could stand up for their rights.

TOMORROW: The return of the militia.

The Disappearance of Jonathan Sewall

In the mid-1760s, Jonathan Sewall allied with Gov. Francis Bernard, writing pseudonymous newspaper essays lampooning James Otis and favoring the Crown. The governor appointed Sewall to be attorney general of Massachusetts in 1767.

Sometime in March 1770, Attorney General Sewall wrote out the indictment of Capt. Thomas Preston and eight soldiers for multiple counts of murder—the Boston Massacre. This document used old British legal formulas: “not having the Fear of God before their eyes, but being moved and seduced by the Instigation of the devil and their own wicked Hearts…”

After 27 March, Sewall expanded that indictment to include three Customs service employees and notary John Munro, caught up in young Charles Bourgate’s accusations. It’s highly unlikely he believed in those charges, but he didn’t fight them.

Ordinarily Sewall would have prosecuted all those defendants, as well as the murder charges against Ebenezer Richardson and George Wilmot. He had personally argued all previous criminal cases since his appointment. Because people knew Sewall was a friend of the royal government, on 13 March the town of Boston voted to hire an attorney to assist him—an unusual move to ensure there was an aggressive prosecution.

Instead, the indictment turned out to be Sewall’s last official act in the Massacre trials. He never appeared in the Boston courthouse again that term. In 1816 defense counsel John Adams recalled: “Mr. Sewall, the Attorney General, who ought, at the hazard of his existence, to have conducted those prosecutions, disappeared.” Solicitor general Samuel Quincy wrote that Sewall couldn’t appear “by reason of Ill health.”

According to Thomas Hutchinson, the problem was the Boston Whigs’ visit to the court on 22 March to demand that the judges proceed to those murder trials. The acting governor wrote, “Sewall tells me he never will appear at any other court in that town, after the present, as Attorney General, and the whole court say they do not sit there with freedom.”

Yet the judges continued to sit. To prosecute the big murder cases, they appointed Robert Treat Paine, a private lawyer in Taunton, and Samuel Quincy. Adams wondered if Sewall was involved in those choices, but there’s no surviving evidence that he was.

Samuel Phillips Savage of Weston complained that Sewall didn’t stop all legal work. In his almanac diary Savage wrote that the attorney general continued to appear “with the jurys of the Inferior Courts at Charlston and Ipswich in the petty Concerns cognizable before the General Sessions of the Peace.” But he never went into Boston.

I suspect there was another factor in Sewall’s action, or lack of it: he was prone to depression. During the war he had a breakdown and spent more than a year in his bedroom. He had other spells of depression later in life, and his son suffered from the same spells while serving as chief justice of Upper Canada.

Even before the war, I think Sewall’s public writing shows a pattern of bursts of energy and silence. He published series of lively and often verbose essays from February to June 1763 (as “J,” “Jehosaphat Smoothingplain,” and “J. Philanthrop”), December 1766 to August 1767 (“Philanthrop”), December 1770 to February 1771 (Philanthrop” reviewing the Massacre trials he’d stayed away from), and June to August 1773 (“Philalethes”).

But in late 1774, after the Powder Alarm drove him into Boston, Sewall went silent. To argue for the Crown, “several of the principal gentlemen” turned to Daniel Leonard and Sewall’s law clerk Ward Chipman to deliver the “Massachusettensis” essays. Sewall may have supported the project, but he couldn’t do the work.

Historians are reluctant to apply psychiatric diagnoses like bipolar disorder to figures of the past. They’re beyond the reach of psychologists. And more than anyone historians know how concepts of mental illness change over time.

But in Sewall’s case, I think attributing his refusal after March 1770 to try the Massacre cases solely to his politics or to Whig pressure might miss a crucial internal force. The attorney general couldn’t bring himself to prosecute the big cases, nor to refuse to prosecute. He just stayed away.

Samuel Phillips Savage: “ye fire fell all around us”

When the Great Fire of Boston broke out in March 1760, merchant Samuel Phillips Savage was one of the town’s selectmen, thus bearing extra civic responsibilities.

Two weeks later, Savage wrote an account of the fire. He heavily revised his draft, crossing out and inserting many phrases and even scribbling a whole new paragraph in between the lines of another.

Savage evidently kept that draft for his records, and it’s now held at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The document doesn’t state the letter’s recipient, but it must be someone who lived nearby because he or she had already heard about the fire.

Savage wrote back:

I am obligd for your Sympathy with the Afflictd Town of Boston on Acct of the late awfull Fire,

I was wak’d with the Cry just after two and when I left the house which was not till I had fully dresd me, I could scarce see any Effects of the Flames but before I got way there the whole house were it began was on fire and by a little after day it had distroyd 345 houses, Warehouses & Shops, never did my Eyes behold so amazing a Scene—

in the hight I happened to be on the top of Fort hill, leading a poor old Woman of 80 just escaped with her life to a Brothers house who had escaped, then I beheld a torrent of Fire, impitously carrying all before it, & would I believe how watered [?], had the town reached 20 Miles farther in yt direction for not one house is left in the exant to leeward of ye Wind.

Once in ye hight of the fire, trembling for fear of the Magazine I went to speak at a fireward who stood in the Midst of fire, then I can say without Exageration that I never in my life was in a greater Storm of Snow or knew it snow faster than ye fire fell all around us.

the Engines then provd useless—their Every attempt provd in vain, the flames had their Commiss’. and tryumphed over, the

And there that page ends.

Here’s the paragraph interlined after “Town of Boston”:

We are really worthy yr pity, you canot have any just Idea of the Calamity, and yet I have not heard One murmering Word. I was out the whole Night and happend abt the hight to be on top of the adjoined hill assisting a aged Woman who had escaped the Flame of her own house and wanted my help to lead her to a friends—the Sight was awfull, I confess at the time the thought of its being a Stroke of heaven absorbd all other Considerations. The loss [?] seemd nothing—but although so many have sufferd and come so greatly yet our Xtian benevolent Neighbors help us.

When transcribing this letter, I struggled with several words, particularly “impitously.” Then I went home and discovered that Savage must have written a variation of “impiteously,” meaning “pitilessly.”

“Watered,” which appears in an inserted phrase written hastily and in small letters, is still a guess. The sentiment is clear—Savage didn’t see any way to stop the fire from going where the wind took it, which fortunately was to the harbor.

(In quoting the letter above, I omitted crossed-out words, didn’t note inserts, and broke the text into shorter paragraphs for easier reading.)

Seeking Out a Statement by “Samuel Savage”

On 21 Mar 1760, Bostonians were assessing the damage from the great fire that had started in Mary Jackson’s shop the night before. So this is a good day to resume The Saga of the Brazen Head.

I’ll start a peek behind the scenes of tomorrow’s posting. I really wanted to find a first-person, close-up account of that fire. I’ve quoted newspaper reports, a broadside, a sermon, and diaries from men in other neighborhoods. But all those descriptions had a distanced quality, produced by either actual physical distance or their collective voice.

I spotted a couple of short quotations in Stephanie Schorow’s Boston on Fire: A History of Fires and Firefighting in Boston (2002) which gave me hope of tracking down more. Schorow’s notes pointed me to the books that she’d (inexactly) quoted from, including Carl Seaburg’s Boston Observed (1971).

And there the trail went dead. Boston Observed is a reader made up mostly of a lot of quotations about Boston from across the centuries, Seaburg noted the sources of those long quotations reasonably well—but not the shorter quotations in his introductory essays. And that’s where the sentences in question appeared.

Seaburg credited certain comments on the 1760 fire to a man he called “Samuel Savage.” He also wrote that the fire had started in “the Brazen Head tavern on King Street.” This whole series of postings started simply because I wanted to correct the misunderstanding (which goes back to a town publication in the late 1800s) that the Sign of the Brazen Head was a tavern rather than a hardware shop. Also, that shop was on Cornhill, not King Street. So I wasn’t completely confident about Seaburg’s quoting.

I made a self-educated guess that “Samuel Savage” was Samuel Phillips Savage (1718-1797, shown above), a Boston merchant and town official in the early 1760s who then moved out to Weston. He came back to chair some of the big public meetings in Old South during the tea crisis. Some of the letters Savage received from his old colleagues and neighbors are valuable sources about what was going on in the big town during the pre-Revolutionary turmoil.

The Massachusetts Historical Society holds Samuel Phillips Savage Papers. In fact, it holds four series of S. P. Savage Papers, apparently because descendants have donated those documents in batches. Unfortunately, the M.H.S. doesn’t have a finding aid for that collection, which would make it easier to look for a particular document, or at all documents from the spring of 1760. Instead, each series has its own chronological sequence.

M.H.S. reference librarian Anna Clutterbuck-Cook helped me understand those nuances of the S. P. Savage Paperses. She also suggested it was worth looking in the Catalogue of Manuscripts of the Massachusetts Historical Society, a nine-volume reference printed in 1969 (with a supplement in 1980). Since Seaburg wrote in 1970, I could probably ignore manuscripts acquired after then.

And that worked! One of the items listed in the printed manuscript catalog was S. P. Savage II’s 3 Apr 1760 “Letter to [unknown] about fire in Boston.” That told me which series of Savage Papers to request in the reading room.

(The manuscript catalogue described another letter in that series this way: “Letter to Mr. Joslyn about young Savage’s conduct,” dated 5 Feb 1756. So of course I made a note to look at that, too. Just a taste: “…it seems a little Strange if they are married, they should be ashamd or afraid to say by whom . . . you have the facts as to his Conduct with Bety Wyre and his Child, whose Care is peculiar and really calls for Pitty—I wish that young Creature may be the only One he has ruined—I should be glad if you would inform me, if Mary Sharrad (for Mary Savage I really believe is not her name), is brought to bed…” Savage conduct indeed.)

TOMORROW: Samuel Phillips Savage at the Great Boston Fire.