Massachusetts’s First Impeachment

In 1706, the elected political leaders of Massachusetts were at odds with the appointed royal governor, Joseph Dudley.

There were many bones of contention, but Gov. Dudley looked most vulnerable for being in league with wealthy supporters who traded with the French in Canada even during Queen Anne’s War.

Dudley, a merchant named Samuel Vetch (1668–1732, shown above), and associates used the cover of arranging prisoner exchanges to ship goods, even weapons, to Acadia.

Through a London printer, the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather published the documents of the case as:

A memorial of the present deplorable state of New-England, with the many disadvantages it lyes under, by the male-administration of their present governour, Joseph Dudley, Esq. and his son Paul, &c.:

Together with several affidavits of people of worth, relating to several of the said governour’s mercenary and illegal proceedings, but particularly his private treacherous correspondence with Her Majesty’s enemies the French and Indians.

To which is added, a faithful, but melancholy account of several barbarities lately committed upon Her Majesty’s subjects, by the said French and Indians, in the east and west parts of New-England.

Elected politicians made up the lower house of the Massachusetts General Court, or legislature. Under the colony’s original charter, that body really was a court—in fact, it was the highest court in Massachusetts.

Under the new charter of 1691, however, that legislature’s power was more limited. It no longer chose the governor. It no longer tried cases. But it did have this ill-defined power called “impeachment.”

The legislators decided to use that to get at Gov. Dudley. The lower house would indict his associates, as the House of Commons could, and the upper house, or Council, would try them.

That effort ran into trouble. The charter limited impeachment to a “High Misdemeanor,” not full criminal charges.

Then Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, a member of the Council, advised that the legislature really didn’t have jurisdiction. Sewall might have hoped the case would proceed in his own court, which could treat the behavior as criminal and even impose the death penalty.

Dudley stepped in and urged the Council to proceed anyway with their misdemeanor charge. That upper house found Vetch and his fellow defendants guilty. They weren’t sure what to do next, but eventually a joint legislative committee produced a “bill of punishment” imposing fines and prison time.

Vetch headed to England to argue his case and wield his influence with the imperial government. The privy council ruled the Massachusetts bill invalid, ruling that the General Court had exceeded its authority.

Vetch, having previously run guns to the Acadians, now presented the Crown with a plan to conquer Canada. Then he came back to Massachusetts to lead the invasion. New England Puritans were ready to get behind any plan to attack Catholics, so they went to war behind Vetch in 1710.

As for impeachment, the Massachusetts General Court didn’t try that again until 1774.

TOMORROW: Impeachment resurfaces.

Anderson on “The History of Fort Sewall,” 5 Nov.

On Thursday, 5 November, the Marblehead Museum will present an online talk by Judy Anderson on “The History of Fort Sewall.”

Marblehead built a fortification on a rocky point overlooking its harbor in 1644. The structure was substantially rebuilt in 1705 for Queen Anne’s War), in the mid-1740s for King George’s War, and at the end of the eighteenth century during the Quasi-War. From two large cannon its armament grew to a reported thirty guns in 1776.

In the early 1800s the site was named after Samuel Sewall (1757-1814) of Marblehead, who served as a justice on Massachusetts’s high court. Federal and state troops staffed Fort Sewall periodically until 1898, whenever America sensed a possible threat to its coasts.

Fort Sewall is now once again owned by Marblehead and functions as a public park, but some of its structures are over two centuries old. With the site’s 375th anniversary in view, the town undertook a program of research and renovation which included preserving masonry, increasing access, and commissioning new research into the site’s history by architect Rick Detwiller.

Anderson, a local historian who served as curator at the Jeremiah Lee Mansion, will speak about the historical context for the fort through the ages, tracing how Marblehead grew and changed and what was happening in the broader Atlantic world when people built and renovated the site.

This talk is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M. on Thursday. The cost of accessing this talk is $15, or $10 for members of the Marblehead Museum. Here’s the link to register.

When Did the British New Year Begin Before 1752?

The earliest examples of a poetic address from colonial American newspaper carriers to their customers on New Year’s Day are all from the fast-growing city of Philadelphia. The first three date from the years 1720-22. No broadsides of those addresses survive, but they were included in a 1740 collection of verse by the Philadelphia printer with the delightful name Aquila Rose.

Then comes another in 1735, and a third from Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette in 1739. Those do survive as flyers, and the second is dated “Jan. 1, 1739.” The Checklist of American Newspaper Carriers’ Addresses catalogues twenty-nine more between then and 1752, the year that the British Empire shifted from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar.

Part of that shift was settling the first day of January as the start of the year. Before then, the English year officially turned over on the Feast of the Annunciation, or 25 March. So when were those pre-1752 New Year’s greetings distributed, around 1 January or around 25 March?

According to that checklist, every address but one that bears a date in its headline was pegged to 1 January, and the exception was dated 31 December. Others discuss winter. None treats 25 March as the start of a new year.

It turns out that most of the British Empire was counting years two ways. The “historical year” ran from January to December. The “civil or legal year” started on 25 March. Parish records often had headings for new years in both January (“New Style”) and March (“Old Style”). From January to March, literate English people designated the year with what looks like a fraction: “1707/08.” (Scotland had officially decided back in 1600 that the new year started in January, so it didn’t need such tricks.)

In daily life, people recognized the discrepancy. I looked at the published diary and correspondence of Massachusetts judge Samuel Sewall. On 1 Jan 1701, he wrote a mediocre poem that starts “Once more! Out God, vouchsafe to shine,” which certainly sounds like he was counting off a year, but he never labeled the poem as such. Richard Henchman responded to Sewall, however, with his own poetic lines which do refer to “our New-year” and “A New-Year’s Day.”

Later remarks from Sewall:

• “Monday, Jany 1. 1704/5 Col. Hobbey’s Negro comes about 8 or 9 mane and sends in by David to have leave to give me a Levit [trumpet blast] and wish me a merry new year.”
• “Jany. 4, 1704/5… My Service to your Lady; I wish you both a good New Year.”
• “Jan’y 21, 1716/17… January begins this New Year (the Julian Year) with almost every body but Englishmen.”
• “April 1, 1718… Now that upon all Reckonings, we are come to the beginning of a New year, I wish it may be a good and Joyfull one to you.”

Likewise, Sewall’s contemporary the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather delivered a sermon titled “A New Year Well-Begun: An Essay Offered on a New-Years-Day” on 1 Jan 1719 (as we’d number the year)—but on the title page the date was “1718/19” because officially he wasn’t in a new year yet. In correspondence between Sewall and Mather there’s at least one letter dated “11th month”—but when had they started counting?

Newspapers reflected that confusion. In March 1720, Gov. Samuel Shute proclaimed that the last day of the month would be a fast day. The Boston News-Letter presented that news in its issue dated 7-14 Mar 1720.

The Boston Gazette printed the same proclamation in its issue dated 7-14 Mar 1719.

Look real close at the Gazette’s date and you’ll see that someone has crossed out the “19” and penciled in “20,” perhaps for later cataloguing.

Another newspaper example: The famous John Peter Zenger free-press case took place in 1734, by our reckoning, but the newspaper in question carried a date of 18 Feb 1733 because Zenger still used O.S. dates.

The English calendar(s) thus provided two days for reflection on the passage of time and opportunities to do more in the next twelve months. That system also required more mental calculation about how a person should write the date and what other people might have meant by a date. The calendar reform of 1752 wasn’t just about catching up with the rest of Europe on the Gregorian Calendar; it was about nailing down the official turn of the year.

Following the Money after the Phillips-Woodbridge Duel

As I prepared yesterday’s posting about the duel between Henry Phillips and Benjamin Woodbridge, I noticed there’s a considerable literature about it. Samuel G. Drake wrote about the event in 1856. The Massachusetts Historical Society heard a paper on the topic in 1861 and another in 1904. In 1874 the Overland Monthly published another telling titled “A Duel on Boston Common.” Brent Simons devoted a chapter to the incident in Witches, Rakes, and Rogues.

Why do we have so much information about this event? Both duelists were from the social elite, but they weren’t really important. As I said yesterday, Phillips had graduated from Harvard. At age thirteen, Woodbridge was one of the people whom Dr. Zabdiel Boylston inoculated against smallpox in the first year of that controversial treatment. But neither young man did anything truly noteworthy before their duel.

The duel itself was unusual because it was reportedly the first in colonial America to end in death, and because colonial Massachusetts society reacted so strongly to it. “The town is amazed!” wrote Judge Samuel Sewall in his diary. Acting governor William Dummer issued a reward for Phillips’s capture; the Massachusetts Historical Society offers a look at that proclamation.

In addition to the new law I mentioned yesterday, there was also an angry sermon from the Rev. Joseph Sewall, the judge’s son, published with a preface by all the town’s clergymen. (The Sewalls had a personal connection to the case; Woodbridge’s business partner was Jonathan Sewall, the judge’s nephew and minister’s first cousin.) But the newspapers, legal documents, and sermons don’t tell us much about the duel itself.

Instead, those details come from the unusually large amount of testimony about the event that was collected and preserved, and those documents were created for a very powerful reason—there was money involved.

Not in the duel itself. The two young men had apparently quarreled over a gambling debt, but ultimately they dueled because their sense of honor exceeded their sense. The big money was the nearly £4,000 in real estate that Henry Phillips owned.

After fleeing to France, Phillips ended up dying in less than a year. Moralists of the time attributed his death to guilt for killing Woodbridge. Today we might wonder about the effect of depression or stress—i.e., a different way of linking the two deaths. Of course, there’s always the possibility Phillips died of a virus or congenital condition that didn’t care about the duel at all.

Whatever way he died, Phillips left no will. Under British common law, his property would go mostly to his older brother, Gillam Phillips (shown above). In contrast, Massachusetts law divided the estate in five among the deceased’s brother, mother, and three sisters (or their children).

Gillam sued, seeking to take a considerable sum from his female relatives (or their husbands). Losing in the Massachusetts courts, he appealed to London. It was apparently as part of that transatlantic lawsuit that Gillam Phillips gathered several depositions from witnesses to the men’s quarrel and the discovery of Woodbridge’s body.

Ten years after the duel, Gillam Phillips finally lost that case. The Privy Council ruled that Massachusetts law applied. In The Transatlantic Constitution, Mary Sarah Bilder of Boston College Law School wrote that that was an important precedent in establishing that colonial law could sometimes differ from British law. Gillam Phillips’s collection of documents eventually came to the Harvard Law School archives, becoming the source material for a no-doubt endless stream of articles about his brother’s fatal duel on Boston Common.

“The defiling and provoking nature of such a Foolish practice”

On 1 Apr 1708, Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), merchant, judge, and eventually chief justice of Massachusetts, wrote to Boston schoolmasters Ezekiel Cheever and Nathaniel Williams:

What an abuse of precious Time; what a Profanation! . . . I have heard a child of Six years old say within these 2 or 3 days; That one must tell a man his Shoes were unbuckled (when they were indeed buckled) and then he would stoop down to buckle them; and then he was an April Fool. . . . Insinuate into your Scholars, the defiling and provoking nature of such a Foolish practice; and take them off from it.

Eleven years later this topic still weighed on Sewall’s mind, and in his diary recorded a lecture to his fourteen-year-old grandson and a younger boarder:

In the morning I dehorted Sam. Hirst and Grindal Rawson from playing Idle Tricks because ’twas first of April; They were the biggest fools that did so.

One starts to sense that someone had once told Judge Sewall that his shoes were unbuckled when they were in fact buckled.

(A version of this item appeared on Boston 1775 in April 2007.)

“Politics and the Pulpit” at Old South This Month

Today the Old South Meetinghouse launches a series of lunchtime talks on the theme of “Politics and the Pulpit.” Each lecture runs 12:15 to 1:00 P.M. and is free to Old South members, $1-6 for others. Here’s the lineup of topics.

Thursday, 7 November
Liberty’s Pulpits: Boston Churches in the Revolution
Churches preaching politics? Hear the inflammatory language of Boston’s Revolutionary preachers in a first-person portrayal by Patrick Jennings of Boston National Historical Park. This program, offering a chance to converse with a late-18th-century minister about politics and religion, premiered at Harborfest in 2011.

Thursday, 14 November
“Liberty is in real value next unto Life”: Samuel Sewall and The Selling of Joseph
In 1697, Judge Samuel Sewall offered a public apology at Old South Meeting House for his role in the Salem witch trials. Three years later, Sewall wrote The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial, the first anti-slavery tract published in New England. Peter Drummey, librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society, which holds the only surviving copy of this pamphlet, discusses Sewall’s use of Biblical text to decry “Man Stealing” and the place of The Selling of Joseph in ongoing discussions of slavery in 18th-century New England.

Thursday, 21 November
“Speaking of Slavery” at the Meeting House
In this premiere performance, Eric Hanson Plass and Merrill Kohlhofer of Boston National Historical Park portray George Washington Blagden, senior minister of Old South Church from 1836 to 1872, and Jacob Merrill Manning, associate and then senior minister from 1857 to 1882. Despite admonitions from Blagden, in 1857 Manning began to speak out publicly on the issue of slavery from the pulpit. In 1858, after John Brown’s raid on Virginia, he declared, “I would certainly have advised him not to do it, but I am far from regretting that the attempt has been made.” This statement begins a conversation between the ministers about slavery, liberty, patriotism, and ministry.

Milestones of Greater Boston, Then and Now

Last week Matt Rocheleau reported for Boston.com on the state government’s plan to restore a colonial milestone along Harvard Avenue in Allston that was damaged by a truck. I knew that Charles Bahne, author of the just-published Chronicles of Old Boston, has studied milestones and other early road markings around Boston, so I asked him for his reaction. Charlie kindly supplied this guest blogger essay.

I’m glad to see that the Massachusetts Department of Transportation is overseeing the milestones now, and that the Massachusetts Historical Commission is involved in plans for preserving this one. I’m pleasantly surprised that they have a count of surviving stones— 47 known to exist in situ. I’m sure that there were many more than 99 erected in the colonial era.

The article repeats the myth that the stones mark the “distance from a stone near City Hall in downtown Boston”—referring to the Boston Stone on Marshall Street. All of the colonial stones in the immediate Boston area were erected before 1735, thus before the Boston Stone was set in a public place. The actual zero point was the northwest corner of the Old State House, today’s State and Washington Streets.

It also does not appear that the Allston 6-mile stone was ever part of a mail delivery system; it was erected before the establishment of an official colonial post office and was never along any of the established post roads.

Rather, most of the stones in the immediate Boston area were erected by prominent political figures, such as Samuel Sewall, Jonathan Belcher, and Paul Dudley. I’m guessing that those men saw the milestones partly as a public service, and partly as a billboard advertising their beneficence—just as we see signs near highway construction projects that give the names of government officials today.

There were originally eight milestones along the road from Boston to Cambridge (Harvard Square). Of these, the stones at 1, 2, and 3 miles are now lost. I assume that the 1- and 2-mile stones—and possibly the 3 as well—were lost during the siege of Boston, since they were in a hotly contested area with entrenchments on both sides.

The 4-mile stone still stands on Huntington Avenue in Roxbury. The 5-mile stone is on Harvard Street in Brookline. The 6-mile stone is referenced in this article. The 7-mile stone is on North Harvard Street in Allston. And the 8-mile stone is at the corner of Garden Street & Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge (slightly moved from its original location in the middle of Harvard Square).

I’ve seen the 3-mile stone on Centre Street in Roxbury and the 5-mile stone at Monument Square (Centre & Eliot Streets) in Jamaica Plain. And of course the “Parting Stone” (not a milestone, but it indicates which route went where) stands at Eliot Square in Roxbury.

I have a copy of an article from the Brookline Historical Society in 1909 reporting the location of several then-existing stones along other highways in Roxbury, Dorchester, Milton, Quincy, Braintree, Canton, Jamaica Plain, and Walpole, in addition to the ones I just mentioned. There is an old milestone in Arlington, near Arlington Heights, which reads simply “8,” and I can’t figure out where that number refers to.

The stones referred to in the article along the Boston Post Road were indeed set up under the instruction of Benjamin Franklin, and in some cases directly under his field supervision. They were erected much later than the stones mentioned in earlier paragraphs.

The Post Road follows U.S. 20 west (with a few modern bypasses) from Watertown Square to about Northborough. At that point U.S. 20 diverges to the south of the Post Road, which goes directly through Worcester. West of Worcester the Post Road follows Mass. Route 9 for several miles, then some other highways, and then rejoins U.S. 20 west of Palmer. In the Springfield area some of the Post Road has been designated as Route 20A.

There were two other routings of the Boston Post Road, one going southwest from Dedham towards Hartford, and one going south from Dedham towards Rhode Island. And in the early nineteenth-century another set of milestones was erected along turnpikes, including the Worcester Turnpike, now Route 9.

As for the sad story of the Allston stone, until about fifteen or twenty years ago it was fairly well protected simply because the city had installed parking meters in that block. The meters defined the parking spaces so that the stone was relatively safe from “attack” by motorized vehicles. When the parking meters were removed, the parking spaces were no longer defined, so people continued to parallel-park in spaces of random length and positions. As a result the milestone was frequently hit and scratched by cars and trucks, a fact which I observed circa 1999. Thus I wasn’t wholly surprised to see that this accident had happened last August.

The other surviving stones along the Roxbury-Allston-Cambridge route are all set back behind the sidewalk, relatively safe from vehicular incursions.

Thanks, Charlie! Part of the plan for restoring the Allston stone is to move it back from the road by about a foot, which would provide a little more protection.

TOMORROW: Milestones on the web.

Salem Revisits Colonial Witchcraft, 18 Nov. and 16 Dec.

Now that Hallowe’en is past, Salem can turn to its real history of witchcraft—or, rather, to the real history of the witchcraft hysteria that began in Salem Village, now Danvers, and spread through Massachusetts.

The Old Town Hall Lectures in Salem series has two upcoming presentations related to that 1692 scare and its repercussions.

Judge Sewall’s Apology
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Illustrated lecture and book signing with Richard Francis

The Salem witch hunt has entered our vocabulary as the very essence of injustice. Judge Samuel Sewall presided at these trials, passing harsh judgment on the condemned. But five years later, he publicly recanted his guilty verdicts and begged for forgiveness. This extraordinary act was a turning point not only for Sewall but also for America’s nascent values and mores.

Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Illustrated lecture and book signing with Emerson (“Tad”) Baker

In 1682, ten years before the infamous Salem witch trials, the town of Great Island, New Hampshire, was plagued by mysterious events: strange, demonic noises; unexplainable movement of objects; and hundreds of stones that rained upon a local tavern and appeared at random inside its walls. Town residents blamed what they called “Lithobolia” or “the stone-throwing devil.” In this lively account, Emerson Baker shows how witchcraft hysteria overtook one town and spawned copycat incidents elsewhere in New England, prefiguring the horrors of Salem. In the process, he illuminates a cross-section of colonial society and overturns many popular assumptions about witchcraft in the seventeenth century.

America’s Revolutionary unrest started over seventy years after the Salem witch scare, about as long as it’s been for us since the Great Depression. But the specter of those events still lingered, as I discussed back here and here. And now it’s the basis of a tourist economy!

Twitter Feed, 9-16 Apr 2010

• Correcting a gravestone in 1773, via Vast Public Indifference: bit.ly/d1rl3d #
• Starred PUBLISHERS WEEKLY review for Jack Rakove's REVOLUTIONARIES: bit.ly/cMrGpY #
• RT @JBD1: Whoohoo! Panel proposal accepted for Society of Early Americanists conf in Philly next March - Libraries of Early US! // Cool #
• Volokh Conspiracy on Georgia attempt to legislate state as republican, not democratic: bit.ly/a0Es5C #
• Back from walking tour on Revolutionary mythmakers at Mt Auburn Cemetery. Cool, sunny weather—excellent for a Victorian stroll. #
• RT @HeritageMuse: I am thinking of using the Toilet Paper Incident from April 1721 in my presentation tomorrow. bit.ly/bwbxC2 #
• Supper entertainment tonight was the Haggerty School 2nd grade's "Constitution Rap." My generation's offer to sing the preamble ignored. #
• House of Boston-born artillerist John Crane as it appeared in 1898, linked to modern map: bit.ly/9V6FlA #
• Last US President to have served in Revolutionary War was first to inspire assassination attempt: bit.ly/9j0aCz #
• Excitement over the arrival of Congressmen from Massachusetts—in May 1775, via @RagLinen: bit.ly/aT9QF4 #
• RT @ToddHouse: #genealogy, chronology of Hichborn family 1673-1891 by Philip Hichborn bit.ly/aDUxFm #
• RT @RagLinen: New Rag Linen collection: The Battle of Lexington and Concord - tinyurl.com/yycpkkx #
• RT @gordonbelt: Curators at @TJMonticello use historical detective work to authenticate Jefferson's Artifacts: bit.ly/afRAuE #
• Home from Charles Bahne's standing-room-only talk about Paul Revere and H W Longfellow at Cyrus Dallin Museum: bit.ly/anmp7z #
• By end of this month, hope to tackle the 19 Apr 1775 stories of Asahel Porter, Hezekiah Wyman, and Israel Bissell. #
• Mercy! Gravestone of Mehuman Hinsdell of Deerfield, Mass, twice a war captive: bit.ly/94cutn #
• Vast Pub Indiff points out the doll in Copley family portrait: bit.ly/aSHOaa Also, child getting Mama's attention is future viscount #
• New website on Jefferson's NOTES ON STATE OF VIRGINIA, so complex it comes with a tutorial: bit.ly/cTlEzw #
• RT @librarycongress: True Story Behind Stevenson's "Kidnapped" discussed with Author A. Roger Ekirch bit.ly/biYfju #
• RT @TJMonticello: RT @NatlParkService: The Man of Monticello: Remembering Jefferson on his Birthday: ow.ly/1y3Dw #
• RT @BBCHistoryMag: Will the British monarchy survive? bit.ly/9Youmd // This essayist says yes. #
• RT @historyfaculty: Historian links homicide rates to the way people feel about their government: bit.ly/b5jvz9 #
• RT @gordonbelt: story about the original Tea Party in 1773 on @NPR this morning: n.pr/ciu1vV #
• From the desk for "duh" news—RT @CanadasHistory: Buffalo News: US way behind Canada in War of 1812 observance funding. ow.ly/1ypk2 #
• RT @librarycongress Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive—ALL public tweets since Mar 2006! // Future historians will shake their heads. #
• @historynerd55 One opportunity/temptation will be to analyze huge blocks of text mathematically: e.g., changing usage of key words. #
• @historynerd55 Historians started to miss important discussions after telephone established; email actually redocuments stuff. #
• @historynerd55 In a couple of decades biographers will be writing about subjects' credit-card bills in lieu of personal letters. #
• RT @lynneguist: Some of Noah Webster's spelling reforms changed AmE, some didn't. Happy anniversary of his dictionary. bit.ly/9rlubH #
• New word of the day: tenoroon. Like a bassoon, but higher. #
• Curious spelling on a 1756 Duxbury gravestone. Or perhaps it's just a curious name. bit.ly/975Ou3 #
• Were pocket diaries from 1700s like Twitter updates? bit.ly/aEndYG Actually, very few diarists recorded their breakfasts. #
• Report on auction of Americana via @JBD1: bit.ly/bhbN8T #
• Quirks of inheritance and emancipation mean there's scant evidence John Hancock owned slaves. But this is SOLID: bit.ly/9PXDSu #
• Plus, I was there when Caitlin Hopkins took this gravestone photo: bit.ly/9PXDSu #
• KIRKUS lambastes historical romance for teens about Nathanael Greene's wife and daughter: bit.ly/9l6mPt #
• Oscar-nominated short from 1950 preserves a mostly all-white, all-male, Cold War view of US history: bit.ly/9m3gYg #
• Vast Public Indifference asks why did Judge Samuel Sewell erect a "Connecticut stone post" for his late wife in 1721? bit.ly/aF967W #
• RT @MilestoneDocs: Declaration of Independence best reflects the character of America: bit.ly/9cBPqs // Nation of high-ideal whiners? #
• RT @gordonbelt: Why Isn't History More Interesting? A history professor tells a story that is both compelling and true: bit.ly/bYuFsX #

Nailing Down Mount Whoredom

One of the mysteries of great importance that Boston 1775 has poked through is the term “Mount Whoredom,” used by British officers in 1775-76 to describe a promontory west of Boston Common. That area became the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Beacon Hill.

As Christopher Lenney and I tracked down, there was a landmark of the same name in greater London, near the Royal Artillery training ground. So was that name brought across the Atlantic by the British officers themselves? Or was it local?

Recently a Boston 1775 commenter alerted me to this entry in the diary of Judge Samuel Sewall back in 1715:

Monday, Augt. 8. Set out at 11. at night on Horseback with Tho. Wallis to inspect the order of the Town. Constable Eady, Mr Allen, Salter, Herishor Simson, Howel, Mr John Marion. Dissipated the players at Nine Pins at Mount Whoredom.

Benjamin Davis, Chairmaker, and Jacob Hasy were two of them. Reproved Thomas Messenger for entertaining them.

So Bostonians were referring to Mount Whoredom many decades before the Revolution, and it was already a site of iniquity—of sorts. On this night the worst behavior the Puritan authorities found was “Nine Pins.” (Make your blood boil? Well, I should say!)

I’ll also quote a letter from Samuel Blachley Webb to Silas Deane, dated 16 Oct 1775:

in my last I mentioned the building the flat Bottom Boats which are now almost compleated and the men are daily exercising in them, such as learning to Row—paddle—land & clime a precipice & form immediately for Action,—they behave much beyond expectation,—this exercise will be of great service if ever we land on the shore of our Enemies, which it seems they much fear as they have hall’d up another Frigate in the Bay back of Mount Whoredom

This amphibious-landing training came a few months before my earlier example of American commanders using the term. Finding additional examples from 1775 will show the name to be even more established in America.

So what’s the full story of Boston’s “Mount Whoredom”? Was that hill:

• named for a similar hill near London? (London certainly has a livelier night life than Puritan Boston.)
• the inspiration for naming the hill in London? (The Boston usage is documented earlier, after all.)
• named after a common term for a red-light district throughout the British Empire? (In that case, there should be more examples out there.)

“As mad now as...in the time of the Witches”

When the Revolutionary War began in 1775, a little more than eighty years had passed since Massachusetts was convulsed by the witchcraft hysteria that began in Salem Village in 1692. As the Enlightenment-era Whig politicians of Boston looked back on that history, did they see it as a quaint oddity? Did they realize that one day it would inspire much of Essex County’s tourist economy?

No, the people of eighteenth-century Massachusetts were deeply embarrassed about the whole witchcraft incident. In 1711, the General Court passed a bill exonerating and compensating the accused (those who had survived). Individuals like Judge Samuel Sewall publicly apologized. New Englanders looked back on those historical events with shame and disbelief, the same way we’re embarrassed at evidence of Jim Crow segregation and other bigotries of eighty years ago.

Thus, one way that the friends of the royal government could hit deep against their Whig opponents was to liken them to the witch-hunters of 1692-93, as in the advertisement from the Boston Chronicle that I quoted yesterday.

In a letter dated 8 Jan 1774, Customs commissioner Henry Hulton wrote:

this last summer I was pelted by the Mob in coming from a public Provincial Entertainment where I had dined by the Governours invitation. . . . they are as mad now as they were in the time of the Witches.

On 5 Mar 1773, when John Adams was feeling unappreciated for his work defending the soldiers after the Boston Massacre, he wrote in his diary:

The Part I took in Defence of Captn. [Thomas] Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety, and Obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country. Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the Verdict of the Jury was exactly right.

This however is no Reason why the Town should not call the Action of that Night a Massacre, nor is it any Argument in favour of the Governor or [government] Minister, who caused them to be sent here. But it is the strongest of Proofs of the Danger of standing Armies.

As Adams sorted out right and wrong, one of his pole-stars was how Massachusetts Puritans had hanged witches and Quakers in the late 1600s—that was wrong.

That attitude has persisted in American politics. We use the term “witch-hunt” (revived in 1938 by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia) to mean a zealous, unjust search for political enemies that would be ridiculous if only people weren’t being hurt. It’s extremely rare to see the opposite—fear of actual witches—arising in a modern political context. This recently circulated video is an exception, and the minister who seeks both funds and protection from “witchcraft” for the political candidate in his church was speaking from a different theological (and legal) tradition.

Around the Globe

Yesterday’s Boston Globe offered H. W. Brands’s review of Joseph Ellis’s latest book on the founding era, American Creation. Brands says of Ellis:

he eschews a continuous rendering of a period—in this case the years 1775 to 1803—in favor of focusing on a handful of discrete events and brief stretches of time. As he has before, he ties the events closely to famous individuals. A chapter on the decision for independence features John Adams. Next comes a chapter on Valley Forge that trails George Washington through the snow (but debunks the vision of the Continental Army commander falling to his knees amid the drifts to seek divine guidance). Ellis then jumps a decade to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and makes James Madison the hero of the hour. The Federalist decade of the 1790s gets two chapters; the book closes with Thomas Jefferson purchasing Louisiana from France in 1803.

Ellis’s style is discursively delightful. “Narrative is the highest form of historical analysis,” he remarks. As his narrative unfolds, so do his conclusions, with such gentle art as almost to compel assent.

That sounds much like Ellis’s entertaining Founding Brothers, except that instead of seeking out lesser-known episodes in the U.S. of A.’s founding, in this book the Mount Holyoke professor hits the best-known moments that many authors have already written about. Random House offers an online excerpt. Ellis will address the Cambridge Forum at First Parish in Harvard Square on Thursday, 1 November, at 7:30; this event is free, and he’s a charming speaker.

The same Sunday paper ran columnist Sam Allis’s musings on tourism in Boston, and how closely it’s tied to history, and thus to (gasp!) mental effort:

What do the ranking of Charleston (3), Santa Fe (4), and Savannah (8) mean? They tell me that Americans—exhausted two-career couples and their kids, in particular—want to relax on their pitifully short vacations. They want easy. They want fun. They want small.

What they don’t want is dutiful. Boston is dutiful. These people don't want an “eat your spinach” history marathon through the 16-station Freedom Trail with the threat of a spot quiz back in the hotel room on Crispus Attucks.

Where can I sign up for that quiz?

Today’s Globe adds David Mehegan’s review of two books touching on witchcraft trials in the late 1600s and his profile of Eve LaPlante, author of one of those books, about Judge Samuel Sewall. The judge lived just a few years into the eighteenth century and was never involved with the province’s break from England. But he was a key figure in the colony’s transition from a Puritan theocracy, and he kept a most human diary.

Finally, the most important story from our local paper: “Sox are kings of diamond.”

Judge Sewall Issues Injunctions

This week I had the good fortune to receive a gift of The Diary of Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), merchant, judge, and eventually chief justice of Massachusetts. He was an important figure in the transition from a Puritan colony to a royal province with a less assured sense of mission. Sewall was also one of the first Americans to argue against the established system of slavery, with his tract The Selling of Joseph.

I thought it was therefore most timely to quote Judge Sewall on an issue that’s more important today than ever. On 1 April 1708 he wrote to Boston schoolmasters Ezekiel Cheever and Nathaniel Williams:

What an abuse of precious Time; what a Profanation! . . . I have heard a child of Six years old say within these 2 or 3 days; That one must tell a man his Shoes were unbuckled (when they were indeed buckled) and then he would stoop down to buckle them; and then he was an April Fool. . . . Insinuate into your Scholars, the defiling and provoking nature of such a Foolish practice; and take them off from it.

Eleven years later this topic still weighed on Sewall’s mind, and in his diary recorded a lecture to his fourteen-year-old grandson and a younger boarder:

In the morning I dehorted Sam. Hirst and Grindal Rawson from playing Idle Tricks because ’twas first of April; They were the biggest fools that did so.

One starts to sense that someone had once told Judge Sewall that his shoes were unbuckled when they were in fact buckled.