“With Geat diffickalty We Exaped With our Lives”

Ebenezer Richardson and George Wilmot evidently met with Gen. Thomas Gage in Salem in the middle of September 1774.

The royal governor moved back to Boston in the last week of that month after an unsuccessful confrontation with the local committee of safety.

Richardson and Wilmot went to the Stoneham home of Kezia and Daniel Bryant, Richardson’s sister and brother-in-law, as I recounted yesterday. They were there on 3 September.

When I first wrote about Wilmot’s story for what was then New England Ancestors magazine, I didn’t realize the significance of that date. That was the day after the “Powder Alarm.”

That event showed how powerless Gov. Gage was outside of Boston. Up to five thousand militiamen had marched into Cambridge, demanded that royal appointees resign, chased Customs Commissioner Benjamin Hallowell for miles, and surrounded Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver’s mansion until he signed a resignation. And there was no response from the royal government.

If Gage couldn’t protect high officials in Cambridge, right across the Charles River, he certainly couldn’t protect an infamous child-killer up in Stoneham. And on 3 September, a rural mob came for Richardson.

According to Wilmot’s petition to Secretary of State Dartmouth:

about Eleven a Clock at Night thee came forty men armed with Goons and Suronded the house of Mr. Brayant—and broke his Windows Strocke out on of his Wife Eyes, and swore they would distroy us for we Ware Toary and Enemys to there Countery—and With Geat diffickalty We Exaped With our Lives and Came to Boston under the protection of the fourth Rigment of foot Quartred there.

His Majesty’s 4th Regiment of Foot was camped on Boston Common.

Richardson and Wilmot must eventually have gotten on board H.M.S. St. Lawrence as planned. They were in London on 19 January when they signed their petitions to Lord Dartmouth. Judging by the handwriting (and spelling), Wilmot wrote both petitions, and Richardson added his signature.

On January, undersecretary John Pownall sent those papers to his counterpart at the Treasury Office, Grey Cooper. He wrote:

As the inclosed Petitions relate to Services performed and Hardships sustained by the Petitioners as Officers of the Revenue, I am directed by the Lord of Dartmouth to transmit them to you and to desire that you will communicate them to Lord North.

In other words, this is a Customs service problem, so it’s up to your department to deal with it.

Treasury officials read the papers on 26 January, and a note on the outside of the bundle states that the two men were paid £10 each.

And with that, “the rank, bloody, and as yet unhanged Ebenezer Richardson” departed from the historical record.

“The infamous murderer Richardson, resided last week at Stoneham”

As of the summer of 1774, Ebenezer Richardson was back in Massachusetts.

We know that from two January 1775 petitions to Lord Dartmouth, one from Richardson and the other from George Wilmot.

Wilmot was Richardson’s co-defendant for murder back in April 1770. A sailor on the Customs ship Liberty, he went into Richardson’s house on 22 February to help defend it from a young mob. However, the gun he held was defective and therefore couldn’t have fired the shot that killed Christopher Seider. The jury acquitted him.

But Wilmot was still an outcast. Or, as his petition said:

And after your Lordships petitioner Stood a fare tryal for his Life and was discharged by there own Laws, they would not Lett him live Quaiett in boston but drove him from his house and famely.

And he was forced to Go to the Castell under the protection of the forteenth Rigment Quarterd thear—Where he remaind Nine Months before he dared Venter abroad—and since that tyme he Could Get No Imployment from them to suporte himself and famely.

Wilmot’s name didn’t appear in the press like Richardson’s, but he may still have been chased around.

Late in the summer of 1774, Wilmot wrote, he and Richardson went “to Salam to Petition Gineral [Thomas] Gagge—for a passeg to Great britton.” According to Richardson, the governor advised them “to Go to England, and procured a passage for them in the Scooner St: Larance.”

That was the Royal Navy warship St. Lawrence, discussed back here. It wouldn’t sail for London until November, so Richardson and Wilmot had to lay low for several more weeks.

On 3 Sept 1774, Wilmot stated, he and Richardson were both “at the house of Mr. Daniel Brayant at Stonham.” Daniel Bryant (1731–1779) had married Ebenezer’s younger sister Kezia (1732–1784). (Yes, Ebenezer also had a wife and a daughter named Kezia.)

Back on 26 Mar 1772, a couple of weeks after Richardson had received his royal pardon, the Massachusetts Spy reported:

We are well informed, that the infamous murderer Richardson, resided last week at Stoneham, at his sister-in-law’s. It is said he intends to come and tarry in Boston very shortly.

I don’t know if that’s a garbled reference to Richardson’s sister Kezia Bryant, or if one of Richardson’s brothers had also married and settled in Stoneham. Either way, people knew the man had relatives north of Boston, and the emphasized word “tarry” looks like a threat of tar and feathers.

Daniel Bryant was a respected member of his community. During the Battle of Lexington and Concord, he was sergeant of one of Stoneham’s militia companies. Soon he would rise to the rank of lieutenant. But was that local standing enough to protect his infamous brother-in-law?

TOMORROW: Yet unhanged.

Talking about Ebenezer Richardson in Stoneham, June 4

On the evening of Tuesday, 4 June, I’ll speak to the Stoneham Historical Society. The society is headlining my talk “The Most Hated Man in Revolutionary Boston.”

Was that Gov. Thomas Hutchinson? Customs Commissioner Benjamin Hallowell? Or even Boston 1775’s latest figure in the spotlight, Capt. John Malcom?

No, for producing long-lasting, multifaceted, bitter antipathy, I don’t think anyone could beat Ebenezer Richardson. In fact, I’ve argued that Richardson did as much as any other individual to turn people in rural Massachusetts against the royal government.

Richardson was born in 1718 on a Woburn farm touching the border with Stoneham. Until the age of thirty-four he was an ordinary middling New England farmer—married, raising children, and helping to house his wife’s poor widowed sister.

Over the next quarter-century Richardson became a secret adulterer, an outcast from his home town, a government informant, a Customs officer, a target of riots, a convicted child murderer, and a fugitive. Starting around 1760, each new scandalous episode linked him more closely to royal officials, whom people saw as protecting him.

I’ve chased traces of Ebenezer Richardson through archives on two continents. This talk brings his story back to, well, not quite to his home town, but to the neighboring town, and also the town where his widowed mother moved after she remarried.

This event is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M. at the Stoneham Public Library, 431 Main Street. It is free and open to the public, sponsored by the Stoneham and Massachusetts Cultural Councils.

The Mystery of Ebenezer Richardson’s Mother

A very long month ago, on the day we reenacted the Boston Massacre for its Sestercentennial, I stopped by the Edes and Gill print shop in Faneuil Hall.

Andrew Volpe was printing his recreation of Paul Revere’s engraving of the Massacre. As proprietor Gary Gregory said, this was the first time in centuries that image was being reproduced on an authentic eighteenth-century press. See an example here.

Volpe had colored some of the prints. I shared my theory about one of the fallen figures being painted with a darker face than others—just how dark varies from copy to copy—to represent Crispus Attucks.

Gary told me about something I hadn’t come across pertaining to the fatal events of early 1770, and I’m still puzzling over it.

The 19 Dec 1771 Massachusetts Spy included this item referring to Ebenezer Richardson:

“Last Tuesday se’nnight died suddenly at Stoneham, Mrs. Abigail Richardson, mother of the noted Esquire Richardson, now under conviction of murder, and whose habitation is now, as it has long been, in Suffolk County goal. She has turned out a true prophetess, having often declared, that she should never live to see this ---famous fellow hanged, though she thought his tu---s in iniquity richly deserved it.”

That paragraph was printed within quotation marks, unlike most death notices. But there was no indication of what source printer Isaiah Thomas was quoting from. My only guess on what “tu---s” signified is “tutors.”

The 23 December Boston Evening-Post ran a shorter version of the same news:

DIED.]…At Stoneham, very suddenly, Mrs. Abigail Richardson, Mother of the noted Richardson, now in Goal here, under Conviction for the Murder of young Sneider. She has turned out a true Prophetess, having, ’tis said, often declared, “that she should never live to see him hanged.”

Other New England newspapers also echoed the Massachusetts Spy’s news.

Yet there’s no listing for Abigail Richardson dying in 1771 in the published vital records of Stoneham, nor the other nearby towns the Richardson family had links to.

However, J. A. Vinton’s The Richardson Memorial, a vast but not always accurate genealogy of the Richardson family, states that Ebenezer Richardson’s mother was born Abigail Johnson, widowed in 1735, and remarried in 1747 to “Dea. Daniel Gould, of Stoneham.”

And the Stoneham vital records do list this death under the name Gould:

Abigail, w[idow]. Dea. Daniel, Jan. ––, 1771, in her 65th y[ear].

The Stoneham records also confirm the marriage of Deacon Gould to “Mrs. Abigail Richardson of Woburn” in 1747. The Woburn records show an Abigail Johnson born in 1697 and one married to Timothy Richardson in 1717, data points that fit together. But that would make the widow Abigail (Johnson Richardson) Gould who died in January 1771 seventy-three years old, not sixty-four.

The next mystery is how this death in January 1771 relates to the Massachusetts Spy item from December. That quoted paragraph said Richardson’s mother had died “Last Tuesday se’nnight,” suggesting it was written in early 1771. Did that text take many months to reach Isaiah Thomas? Does quoting from an old letter explain why the newspaper put quotation marks around the old news?

It’s also notable that the letter referred to the woman by a previous surname, not Gould. Does that indicate the writer didn’t know Abigail (Johnson Richardson) Gould personally, but was passing on second- or third-hand information about her death? And if so, was that writer really privy to the woman’s comments about her son being hanged?

“Mr. Cleaveland’s moral, Christian and ministerial character”

Yesterday we left the Rev. John Cleaveland, Jr., at odds with his Stoneham neighbors in 1794. The trouble was his second marriage to young Elizabeth Evans, until recently his housekeeper and apparently not even a dedicated member of the church.

As the Congregational Library says in its description of meetinghouse records from Stoneham: “While the church chose to support Cleaveland, the town did not, and both Cleaveland and the church building itself were targets of the town’s ire.” Not to mention the minister’s horse.

At the end of September 1794, after months of feuding, an ecclesiastical council of ministers from other towns came to work out the dispute. The congregation had to borrow money from two members to lodge and feed those ministers, one reason why they may have delayed that step for so long.

In his History of Stoneham William B. Stevens reported that council found:

1. That Mr. Cleaveland’s influence among this people is lost, and irrecoverably lost, and that it has become necessary that his ministerial connection with them be dissolved, and it is the advice of this council that he ask a dismission from his pastoral relations to them.

2. It appears from the fullest and they trust from the most impartial examination of the subject of which they are capable, that Mr. Cleaveland has given no just cause for that aversion and opposition to him which in so violent, and very unprecedented a manner they have displayed.

3. It appears to this council that Mr. Cleaveland’s moral, Christian and ministerial character stands fairly and firmly supported, and they cordially recommend him to the church and people of God wherever in the Providence of God he may be cast.

4. As Mr. Cleaveland has given to this people no just cause for that opposition to him which they discover, and which renders his removal from them necessary, and as his removal must be attended by great inconvenience and expense to him, it is the opinion of this council that he ought to receive a compensation, and they recommend it to the parties concerned to choose mutually three judicious, impartial characters from some of the neighboring towns to estimate the damage to which Mr. Cleaveland is subjected by his removal. . . .

Finally the council deeply impressed with the singular sacrifice which Mr. Cleaveland’s friends make in parting with their valuable and beloved pastor beg leave to exhort them to acknowledge the hand of God in this afflicting Providence as becomes Christians; to maintain the order of Christ’s house, and with unremitting ardor promote the interest of His kingdom.

In other words, no recriminations, please. I can’t tell if the Stoneham meeting gave Cleaveland a generous severance package as the council recommended. He preached his last sermon at the end of October—and then published the text. It included lines like, “people who have rejected a faithful watchman, will have a most dreadful account to give in the great day.” So there were some recriminations on his part.

Over the next few years Cleaveland worked a visiting minister at various meetinghouses. This had the advantage of letting him recycle his sermons for new audiences. Yale reports that one of his compositions “was first given at Newburyport on June 25, 1797, and then given twice more at Chebacco [another name for Essex, his home town] and Topsfield in 1797, at Medway in 1798, and at Medfield and Attleboro in 1799.”

In June 1798 the Rev. John Cleaveland finally secured a permanent pulpit at a new parish in Wrentham, which has since become Norfolk. Until the meetinghouse was finished he preached in the house shown above, photo courtesy of the town.

He became known for his very regular habits, devoting “two afternoons, weekly, to systematic visitation of his people.” In addition:

He was remarkably punctual; so much so, that when he found he was likely to arrive at the meeting-house five minutes too soon, he would walk his horse, so as invariably to reach the door within three minutes of the time.

Cleaveland preached in Wrentham until his death in 1815. The Rev. Nathaniel Emmons spoke at his funeral, a sign that Cleaveland was a traditionalist. His sermons now rest with his father’s in the Manuscripts and Archives Department of the library at Yale, the college he had never been able to attend. [I worked in that department as a student years ago.]

As for Elizabeth Cleaveland, she remained at the minister’s side until his death. They never had children (nor did he have any by his first wife). After being widowed, Elizabeth Cleaveland married another minister, the Rev. Walter Harris of Dunbarton, New Hampshire. Like her first husband, he was a Continental Army veteran, having served three years as a fifer from Connecticut. By the time Elizabeth Harris died in 1829, later authors agreed, she had become as pious as the people of Stoneham could have wished.

The Difficult Career of the Rev. John Cleaveland, Jr.

John Cleaveland was born in the part of Ipswich that’s now Essex in 1750. He was the son and namesake of the town minister.

John, Jr., apparently grew up expecting to study at Yale, where his father had graduated five years before his birth. But that didn’t work out.

Mortimer Blake’s A Centurial History of the Mendon Association of Congregational Ministers (1853) said Cleaveland had a younger brother and “the father being unable to support both in college, decided to treat both alike, and give them the best education he could.”

However, Yale’s library catalogue says there were three younger brothers, two becoming doctors and one dying young, as well as three sisters. And John Cleaveland, Jr., was “debarred by his health from completing his education” at that college.

For whatever reason, the younger John Cleaveland never graduated from Yale. Indeed, he may never have entered. In 1773 he married a woman named Abigail Adams in his father’s home town of Canterbury, Connecticut. Two years later John joined Col. Moses Little’s regiment of the Continental Army, for which his father was chaplain.

After the war, John, Jr., studied theology on his own. Finally in 1785, at the age of thirty-five, he was ordained in Stoneham. His tenure there was peaceful until June 1793, when Abigail Cleaveland died.

Or more precisely, the Rev. Mr. Cleaveland’s tenure was peaceful until January 1794, when he married Elizabeth Evans, his young housekeeper. Even in a society that wanted ministers to be married, some people thought six months was too soon. What’s more, there were doubts about the new Mrs. Cleaveland’s faith. “She was not pious,” Blake wrote. “This marriage with a non-professor, troubled some pious minds at Stoneham.”

Most important church members stood by their pastor. Their opponents therefore resorted to unorthodox means of showing their disapproval. According to William B. Stevens’s 1891 History of Stoneham:

At one time they nailed up the door of the minister’s pew, at another, covered the seat and chairs and the seat of the pulpit with tar. Not content with these indignities against the pastor, some one vented the general spite by inflicting an injury upon his horse, probably by cutting off his tail.

The church stood by him, but the town voted to lock and fasten up the meeting-house against him, so that for a time public worship was held at the house of Deacon Edward Bucknam. They refused to raise his salary, requested him to relinquish his ministry and leave the town, declined to furnish any reason, and rejected his proposition to call a council…

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

The Stoneham Meeting and the Rev. John Carnes

The Congregational Library recently announced that it had added the church records of two more Massachusetts towns—Brockton and Stoneham—to its “Hidden Histories” digital collection.

The description of the Stoneham materials says:

The town of Stoneham, previously known as Charlestown End, was incorporated in 1725. A vote in 1726 provided for the building of a 1,440-square-foot meetinghouse. First Church itself was not founded until July 1729. Their first pastor was Rev. James Osgood who was called in October 1728, and ordained and installed in September 1729. Osgood served until his death in 1746 and was replaced by Rev. John Carnes, who was dismissed from his position in 1757.

John Searl succeeded John Carnes in 1758/59, followed by the ordination of John Cleaveland in 1785. Cleaveland’s ministry began amicably and he continued in the town and church's favor until the death of his wife in 1793. After his wife’s death, Cleaveland married Elizabeth Evans, his housekeeper, which created tensions in the town. While the church chose to support Cleaveland, the town did not, and both Cleaveland and the church building itself were targets of the town’s ire. An ecclesiastical council called late September 1794 dissolved Cleaveland’s relationship with the town and church.

Despite distractions, my eye was caught by the name of the Rev. John Carnes. A few years back, I named him as Gen. George Washington’s first paid spy. However, that was nearly twenty years after Carnes’s contentious tenure at Stoneham.

Alas, the early volume of church records digitized in this collection—the one document that covers Carnes’s period as minister—doesn’t appear to mention his conflict with the congregation at all. Nor the decision to build a parsonage for him, shown above.

William B. Stevens’s 1891 town history quotes a letter from Carnes to the meeting on 17 May 1750:

I have year after year desired you to consider me with regard to my Salary, but notwithstanding this, and notwithstanding I have sunk by ye fall several Hundred Pounds, I have never had since my ordination but a poor pitiful consideration of £50 Old Ternor.

Whatever you think of it, gentlemen, you have been guilty of great Injustice & oppression and have withheld from your minister more than is meet, not considering what you read, Prov. 11, 24, 25, which Verses run thus. There is that scattereth and yet Increaseth, and there is yt witholdeth more than is meet but it tendeth to poverty. The liberal soul shall be made fat; and he yt watereth shall be watered also himself.

You have never made good your contract with your minister, and was it not for some of his good Friends in this Town and other Places, he must have suffered. Time has been when I have had no corn nor meal in my House & when I have wanted many other necessaries and havent had one Forty shillings in ye World, nor yet Thirty shillings, and when I have been obliged to live by borrowing; and this is ye case now.

But I shall say no more about my circumstances and your Injustice and oppression. What I desire of you now is that you would at this meeting act like honest men and make good your contract that you would make such an addition to my Salary for the present year as that I may be able to subsist. I desire nothing that is unreasonable, make good what you first voted me and I shall be easy. I remain your friend and servant, John Carnes.

P. S. Gentlemen—Please to send me word before your meeting is over what you have done, yt I may send you a Line or two in order to let you know I am easy with what you done or not; for if I cant get a Support by the ministry I must pursue something else; must betake myself to some other business and will immediately do it.

Carnes lasted seven more years at Stoneham before asking to be dismissed. He published a newspaper essay about the conflict, prompting a town meeting vote to respond. Despite that friction, Carnes secured another pulpit at Rehoboth—but that lasted even less time. Finally he opened a shop in Boston, his last career before becoming a spy.

The Unhappy Ministerial Career of the Rev. John Carnes

John Carnes was born in Boston in 1723. His father was a pewterer who improved his social position through militia service. During the Big Dig, archeologists explored his land in the North End and discovered wine bottles personalized with the man’s name in the wax seals. Carnes had many children, but only young John was apparently interested in becoming a minister, so his father sent him off to Harvard, paying the tuition in pewter tableware.

While John was at college in 1740, the Rev. George Whitefield (shown here) made his first visit to Cambridge, reportedly preaching under an elm on the common. John felt inspired by this “New Light” religious revival, though the professors and tutors were more suspicious.

John Carnes graduated in 1742, earned his master’s degree, and was ordained as the new minister at Stoneham in December 1746. The following July, he married Mary Lewis of Lynn, three years his senior and from a comfortably wealthy family. John and Mary Carnes looked like they were in for a typical rural Massachusetts minister’s career: many uneventful years in the pulpit, children every two or three years, &c.

But the Stoneham congregation came to dislike and disrespect Carnes. They never raised his salary, and didn’t pay what they promised in a timely way, and finally drove him to resign in July 1757. He published his side of the dispute in the Boston Gazette the next month.

Carnes and his family moved back to his wife’s home town of Lynn. After preaching in various meetings, he accepted the job of minister at Rehoboth’s Seekonk parish in April 1759. Almost immediately some congregants started to complain. Their objections may not have been about Carnes so much as how people were taxed for his salary. The grousers appear to have been a minority of the congregation, but a loud one.

In 1763 a council of men from eight other churches met to arbitrate the dispute. They questioned Carnes and his opponents and concluded:

nothing has appeared inconsistent with either his christian or ministerial character. We have reason to conclude that he hath been uncommonly supported under his continued trials and temptations, discovered a serious spirit, and endeavoured in the midst of numberless discouragements, to carry on the great design of his ministry.

But his opponents still weren’t satisfied, and asked the Massachusetts General Court to intervene. A committee of the legislature investigated the situation in Reheboth and decided once again that Carnes had done nothing wrong. But they found “an unhappy alienation of affection in his people to him, and incurable.”

In December 1764, at the Rev. John Carnes’s request, the Seekonk congregation dismissed him from their pulpit. He was forty-one years old, had a wife and five children to maintain, and had failed twice at the only profession he was trained for.

TOMORROW: John Carnes comes home to Boston.