“Wishing you Every Blessing in Time and Eternity”

Among the documents in the Samuel Adams Papers at the New York Public Library is a letter from the politician’s second wife, the former Elizabeth Wells (1735–1808), on 12 Feb 1776.

Small portions of this letter have been transcribed and published, sometimes with an erroneous date and other errors. Here’s my best rendering at the whole text (with added paragraph breaks for easier reading).

Cambridge Feb 12, 1776

My Dear

I Receivd your affectinate Letter by Fesenton [express rider Josiah Fessenden], and thank you for your kind Concern for My health and Safty. I beg you Would not give your self any pain on our being so Near the Camp. the place I am in is so situated that if the Regulars should Ever take prospect hill (which God forbid) I should be able to Make an Escape, as I am Within a few stones Cast of a Back Road Which Leads to the Most Retired part of Newtown.

if a Large Reinforcement should Come in to Boston I propose to send the Best of my things into the Country, and have My Self Nothing but a bed and a few Necessarys, and be in Readiness to Move at an Minutes Warning—

Mr. [John] Adams made me a visit after I Wrote to you, so I Must aquit him of treating me with Neglect. I Should have sent a Letter by Him, but I was unexpectedly sent for three days to dine at Cambridge, With Samey [?] and was treated by General Washington and his amiable Lady With great Friendship.

I hadn’t included Elizabeth Adams on the list of people who visited the Washingtons in Cambridge before, but this letter shows she did.

I’m not sure about the name “Samey” or, if that’s the right transcription, who it referred to. Samuel Adams’s son by his first wife was also named Samuel, but at this point he was a grown man and a doctor serving in the army, and he and Elizabeth were usually more formal with each other.

I was in hopes I should had the opportunity of Returning the Compt. by inviting them to dine with you at our house, but by what Fesenton tells Me I fear I shall not see you so soon as I Flatterd My self. I beg (My dear) you would try to Come if the visit is Ever so Short——

I saw the Doct. [I think this is Dr. Samuel Adams, Jr.] this day he is Well and says he Wrote to you last Week. Jobs Father and his family is come out of Boston, but I have not seen him so that I Cannot tell what he has done with the things we left in his Care.

Job was a servant boy the Adams family had hired a couple of years before. I’ve written about wanting to identify him. This paragraph adds a clue: Job was from Boston, not a rural town, and his father was still alive in 1776.

a great Number of the poor Come out Every Week, and are taken good Care of by the Committe Chose for that Purpose——

I Supose you have heard that a great Number of tories are gone to England, old gray among them. young Mr [William] Peperell has lost his Wife. [Thomas] Flukers youngest Daughter [Sally] is an actress on the stage in Boston, and her Father and Mother gone home. Mr. [James] Otis daughter [Elizabeth] is Married to an Regular officer [Leonard Brown].

they have pulled down a great many houses for fire Wood among nothers in our Neighbourhood are old Mr. grays, Blairs Coles [?] and Walcuts and an Number in long Lain. you see that I Write you all the News however trifling.

that house that Mother Lived in of Mrs. Carnes is Burnt, and and [sic] all her goods taken away by the soldrs. I saw her last Week, she is Well, and Boards at one Mr Sanders at Waltham where she is treated very kind. She has her Board and Hannahs paid out of the donations. She sends you her best Love and Blessing.

Elizabeth Adams’s mother, Susanna Wells, was evidently accompanied by her daughter Hannah (c. 1755–1803), then unmarried.

In the following paragraph, “Polly” was someone Samuel Adams sent greetings to as “Sister Polly,” so I’m guessing she was Mary Checkley (b. 1721), sister of his late first wife. “Surry” was an enslaved woman given to the family, whom at some point Adams freed.

Polly desires her particular Regards to you and thanks you for the kind manner you Mention her in your Letters. We are all in good health. Surry and Job send their duty—after Wishing you Every Blessing in Time and Eternity, I subscribe My self yours
Elizah. Adams

PS. I beg you to Excuse the very poor Writing as My paper is Bad and my pen made with Scissors. I should be glad (My dear) if you should not come down soon, you would Write me Word Who to apply for some Monney for I am low in Cash and Every thing is very dear
—adieu

Back in June 1775, Samuel had closed a letter to Elizabeth, “when I am in Want of Money I will write to you.” The family’s only source of income was the Massachusetts government, which of course was in some flux.

The Adventures of the Two Boston Cannon?

The last book I’ll highlight in this stretch of postings is no longer available in stores but can be read online—not that I recommend that.

In 1894 Rhode Island native Hezekiah Butterworth published The Patriot Schoolmaster; or, The Adventures of the Two Boston Cannon, the “Adams” and “Hancock”: A Tale of the Minute Men and the Sons of Liberty. The book included a few illustrations by H. Winthrop Peirce of Andover.

The Patriot Schoolmaster is historical fiction for young readers, and not very good at that. As the extended subtitle might suggest, Butterworth tried to cram every tradition of Revolutionary Boston into the book, and the result is a mishmash of events that never coheres into a plot.

On top of that, Butterworth kept breaking off from what little story there is to fill us in on the history, or future, of his characters, sometimes quoting long passages from his source material. One begins to suspect he was being paid by the word and never reread what he’d written.

The young hero, Allie Fayreweather, starts out as “about twelve years old,” but he seems younger, or stupid. The date of the opening action is “Saturday, September 27, 1768.” The novel lasts until Continental troops march into Boston, or six and a half years later. And Allie never seems to get older or smarter.

Most other characters are types reflecting the age when the book was written. It starts with Samuel Adams’s enslaved maid Surry speaking in broad dialect, and she remains a major character. Later Phillis Wheatley appears, better spoken but deferential and totally starstruck by Gen. Washington. The villain is a pompous, violent Tory named Dr. Oliver. Curiously, the title character plays a minor role. Instead, Samuel Adams is the anchor of the action, with his dog Queue and fictional young Allie trotting after him.

You might wonder why I mention The Patriot Schoolmaster at all. This book shows how the story of “the Two Boston Cannon, the ‘Adams’ and the ‘Hancock’” was a standard part of Boston’s Revolutionary narrative in 1894. To be sure, the novel gets nearly every detail of that narrative wrong. But for New England children of the turn of the last century, the legend of those cannon was as familiar as Paul Revere’s ride is to us now. Yet by the time of the Bicentennial, when I was growing up, that story was unknown.

My new book, The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War, aims to change that. But with sources more reliable than The Patriot Schoolmaster. I’ll be speaking about that history at the Massachusetts Historical Society on Thursday.

Two New Pre-Revolutionary Comics to Choose Between

Tea Party: An American Story is a webcomic from Sam Machado, Cynthia “Theamat” Sousa, and Amanda Sousa Machado, signing themselves as TAS.

It’s one of the most scrupulous fictional depictions of pre-Revolutionary Boston that I’ve seen. As a measure of the level of detail, in episode 6 the Samuel Adams household includes Surry, Job, and Queue. Episode 2 shows Benjamin Burdick tending bar at the Green Dragon Tavern (or, as he advertised it, the Freemason’s Arms).

As a result, there’s not much action in the story. So far it’s shown the Boston Whigs talking seriously about the political issues of the day, largely in the terms of the time. The court party hasn’t shown up yet, limiting the conflict to the frictions internal to those activists and their families. But eventually we’ll move from the judicial salaries issue to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s letters to the tea.

On the other end of the comics spectrum, Dark Horse has issued the first issue of The Order of the Forge, written by Victor Gischler and illustrated by Tazio Bettin. The company’s summary:

Before he fathered a nation, young George Washington forged his legend in blood! Imbued with the mystical powers of America’s original inhabitants, George—along with his friends Ben Franklin and Paul Revere—must stop an evil governor who wishes to rule an empire!

The sell line is supposedly in young Washington’s words: “I cannot tell a lie. I f**king hate zombies.” That’s him with his little hatchet on Juan Ferreyra’s cover.

Samuel Adams and Slavery: The Private Man

Though Samuel Adams was cautious about pushing for the abolition of slavery as a politician, as I discussed yesterday, he seems to have been firm in his private behavior. At least, that’s how his descendant and biographer William V. Wells described him.

When Samuel remarried, his second wife Elizabeth was given an enslaved woman named Surry. He reportedly insisted that “A slave can not live in my house; if she comes she must be free.” It’s unclear whether the family formally freed Surry at that time; they were apparently still writing out emancipation papers many years later.

However, Adams’s letters showed that he cared about Surry as a member of his household. When he was in Philadelphia in 1775 and worried about his family getting out of British-occupied Boston, he remembered her in his letters to his wife:

• 17 June: “I wish to hear that my Son and honest Surry were releasd from their Confinement in that Town.”
• 28 June: “Let me know where good old Surry is.”
• 30 July: “Tell Job and Surry that I do not forget them.”

Some authors say Samuel Adams was one of the few American founders who never owned a slave, but he and his wife did hold title to Surry for at least a while. In contrast, John and Abigail Adams and Alexander Hamilton never owned anyone else. The elderly Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush were active Abolitionists. But even if Samuel Adams didn’t push hard for the end of slavery in public, he seems to have practiced his values at home.

[ADDENDUM: In 2020, eleven years after this blog post was published, the Schuyler Mansion in New York published a report documenting how Alexander Hamilton did own slaves, contrary to assertions of recent biographers. See the discussion and links here.]

Samuel Adams and Slavery: The Public Man

Back in November, biographer Ira Stoll published an opinion essay in the New York Daily News about Samuel Adams’s views on slavery, drawing a contrast between him and some of his Revolutionary colleagues on the issue. I think Ira might have overstated the case a little in proposing that “of all our founding fathers, he is the one perhaps most likely to have” dreamed of a black President.

Adams expressed a distaste for slavery and supported an end to the transatlantic slave trade (which was different from wanting to end slavery in the colonies or U.S. of A. themselves). But he was far from alone among American politicians in doing so. Even Continental Congress members whose entire lives depended on enslaved labor nevertheless tsk-tsked about the institution. Only a few ever took practical steps to limit it in their own states and estates.

Adams supported mild anti-slavery measures in Massachusetts. In May 1766, Boston’s town meeting—where he was an important organizer—instructed its representatives to the General Court to propose a law against buying and selling slaves in Massachusetts. This was, the town noted, a first step to ending slavery in the province altogether. The legislature (where Adams had just become Clerk of the lower house) instead enacted laws against importing slaves. That law wouldn’t have affected the slaves already in Massachusetts—except perhaps by making them more valuable. And the government in London vetoed the law anyway.

On 8 Jan 1774 Adams, still Clerk, wrote to John Pickering, representative from Salem:

As the General Assembly will undoubtedly meet on the 26th of this month, the Negroes whose petition lies on file, and is referred for consideration, are very solicitous for the Event of it, and having been informed that you intended to consider it at your leisure Hours in the Recess of the Court, they earnestly wish you would compleat a Plan for their Relief. And in the meantime, if it be not too much Trouble, they ask it as a favor that you would by a Letter enable me to communicate to them the general outlines of your Design.

Peter Bestes, Felix Holbrook, and two other black men had submitted a petition the previous fall, seeking their freedom. Adams and Pickering were on the committee that had recommended that it be held over. Eventually the House passed another bill—not to answer those men’s plea but again to prohibit the import of slaves. And to no one’s surprise, it too was vetoed.

Adams served for years in the Continental Congress, but never pushed on the slavery issue when it would harm the alliance of the states. During the debate over the U.S. Constitution, Abolitionists objected to the clause preserving the slave trade until at least 1808. Adams, once he came over to the Federalist side, argued that it was good that the document talked about ending the slave trade at all.

Overall, it seems clear that Adams opposed keeping African people and their descendants in bondage for life, but he never pushed that cause at the expense of others he thought were more important. When he wrote newspaper essays against “slavery,” he almost always meant the metaphorical slavery of white propertied men losing their political rights.

Might Samuel Adams have dreamed of a black President? I doubt the idea occurred to him, or to most other politicians of his time.

“By You and Them I Mean to Be Cared For”

Yesterday I quoted Samuel Adams’s descendant William V. Wells on an African-American woman named Surry, who came to the second Elizabeth Adams as a slave and remained with the family after emancipation. Wells wrote that when the Adamses gave Surry freedom papers, she “threw them into the fire, indignantly remarking that she had lived too long to be trifled with in that manner.”

That story put me in mind of some anecdotes in William D. Piersen’s book Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England. Piersen pored through many sources, particularly local histories, for clues to how black New Englanders lived in the late colonial and early republican periods.

In particular, he described other resisting attempts to free them:

Slaves who became old in service to a white family often refused a “reward of freedom because they felt at home in their master’s household and because they could have assurance there that they would be cared for in their old age. Prince Jonar [also called Prince Yongey], an African-born slave owned in succession by Joseph Buckminster and his son Thomas, managed a farm in Framingham, Massachusetts, where he lived in a small cabin overlooking a meadow he had picked for cultivation because it reminded him of the soil of his native country. Offered freedom in his old age, Jonar refused by sagaciously citing a proverb common to Yankee slaves in this situation: “Massa eat the meat; he now pick the bone.”

As William Brown, the son of a Rhode Island slave, explained, “The old bondsmen declared their master had been eating their flesh and now it was the slaves’ turn to stick to them and suck their bones.” Mose Parson’s slave avoided the African proverbial intricacies by commenting more bluntly: “You have had the best of me, and you and yours must have the worst. Where am I to go in sickness or old age? No, Master, your slave I am, and always will be, and I will belong to your children when you are gone; and by you and them I mean to be cared for.”

Domestic slaves were especially apt to remain with their masters or return shortly after gaining freedom. The refusal of freedom was, as might be expected, more common among older women since they would have greater difficulties outside the family and because they usually retained close bonds to the white children they had helped raise.

Wells dated his story to after “the institution of slavery was formally abolished in Massachusetts,” or 1783. He also said that Surry had arrived in the household about 1765 as a “servant girl” and remained “for nearly half a century,” or well into the 1800s. So Surry was apparently only in early middle age when she destroyed the freedom papers. But she felt “she had lived too long to be trifled with.”

Samuel Adams’s Servant Surry

William V. Wells’s The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, published by Little, Brown in three volumes in 1865, offers this description of one member of the Adams household:

The black servant girl, Surry, was presented to [the second] Mrs. [Elizabeth] Adams by Mrs. Checkley [the first Elizabeth Adams’s mother or sister] about the year 1765, and, having been freed by Mr. Adams, lived with the family for nearly half a century. Surry never left Boston but twice, which was during the British occupation, and when the small-pox prevailed in town during the administration of Governor Adams.

She served every member of the household with an affectionate devotion, which nothing could change. When the institution of slavery was formally abolished in Massachusetts, though she had long been free, additional papers were made out for her: but she threw them into the fire, indignantly remarking that she had lived too long to be trifled with in that manner.

So what does this portrait say about Samuel Adams’s views on slavery? The challenge is that Wells isn’t unbiased: he was an Adams descendant, writing at the end of the Civil War when slavery had become very unfashionable, so he had every reason to downplay his ancestors’ participation in that system.

Wells probably thought the story of Surry destroying her emancipation papers reflected well on Samuel and Elizabeth Adams—they were such nice people their once-enslaved servant never wanted to leave. But it can also prompt us to ask why they gave Surry emancipation papers after 1783 if they’d already legally freed her.

TOMORROW: And why would Surry have destroyed those freedom papers?

Who Was Samuel Adams’s “Servant Boy Job”?

On 13 Apr 1772, Samuel Adams wrote to his friend James Warren, a merchant in Plymouth (shown at left):

I am much obligd for your Care in procuring for me a Boy.

I shall be ready to receive him about the middle of next month and shall take the best care of him that shall be in my Power till he is 14 years old, perfecting him in his reading and teaching him to write and cypher [i.e., do arithmetic] if capable of it under my own Tuition for I cannot spare him the time to attend School. Will strictly regard his Morals and at the End of time I will if his parents shall desire it, seek a good place for him to learn such a Trade as he and they shall chuse.

This is an interesting look at Adams’s class expectations. Though not a rich man, he had household servants looking after him and his family—including a woman named Surry, who was legally enslaved. Adams sent his own son to the Latin School and Harvard, but planned to teach this boy more rudimentary knowledge at home because “I cannot spare him the time to attend School.”

During Samuel’s absence from Boston to attend the Continental Congress starting in mid-1774, he and his wife Elizabeth exchanged some letters that mention a boy named Job. Elizabeth on 12 Sept 1774:

PS. . . . [Surry?] and Job send their dutty.

Samuel to Elizabeth, 17 June 1775:

It is a great Satisfaction to me to be assured from you that your Mother & Family are out of Boston, and also my boy Job. I commend him for his Contrivance in getting out. Tell him from me to be a good Boy. I wish to hear that my Son and honest Surry were releasd from their Confinement in that Town.

Samuel to Elizabeth, 30 July 1775:

Pay my proper Respects to your Mother & Family, Mr & Mrs. Henshaw, my Son & Daughter, Sister Polly &c. Tell Job and Surry that I do not forget them.

Finally, on 28 Sept 1778, Samuel wrote to his “dear Betsy” with this praise:

I think you have done well in putting your Servant Boy Job an Apprentice to a Sail Maker. I hope you will injoyn it on him to let you see him often, that you may give him your Advice, and tell him it is my Desire that he would attend to it. I love the Boy, and am still of opinion, that if he is properly mannagd he will make a good Citizen.

By this point Samuel was referring to the boy as Elizabeth’s servant rather than his own; she was clearly running the household while he was away for so many months in Philadelphia.

A couple of generations later, one of Adams’s descendants wrote a biography of him that stated:

Another member of the family was a servant boy, whose education Mr. Adams attended to as conscientiously as though he had been his own child. The boy lived to become an influential mechanic in Boston, and was conspicuous in 1795-96 as an active politician in electing his old master to the Chief Magistracy [i.e., governor] of the Commonwealth.

So it looks like young Job lived with Samuel Adams’s family probably from 1772, and certainly from 1774, through 1778. He would therefore have had an intimate perspective on the period of the Boston Tea Party, the return of British troops, the start of the war, the siege of Boston, the Declaration of Independence, and the difficult months that followed. If Elizabeth Adams found an apprenticeship for Job when he was about to turn fourteen, as her husband had planned, that means he’d been born in 1764 and grew up with the Adamses from about age eight. Then he went to work for a sailmaker, at least at first. And the family recalled that he was still in Boston and politically active about twenty years later.

Researchers interested in Adams, in the history of childhood, in the American working class and its politics—we need to find this person!!!!!