“The procession of the old clergymen who filled our pulpit”

Back in January I quoted Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes on one of the impressive clergymen who came to preach in his father’s pulpit in Cambridge while he was a boy.

Young Oliver was born in 1809 in the house that had belonged to the Harvard College steward Jonathan Hastings. In 1775 the Massachusetts committee of safety and Gen. Artemas Ward took it over as the first rebel headquarters of the war.

In The Poet at the Breakfast Table, Holmes described some ministers whose names I know because they wrote recollections about the Revolutionary period when they themselves were boys.

Holmes recalled the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris (1768–1842) of Dorchester this way: “already in decadence as I remember him, with head slanting forward and downward as if looking for a place to rest in after his learned labors.”

The Rev. David Osgood (1747–1822) has made only one appearance in Boston 1775, guarding his privilege to perform all marriages in his town. Holmes recalled him as “the most venerable David Osgood, the majestic minister of Medford, with massive front and shaggy over-shadowing eyebrows.”

Holmes’s longest profile limned the “attenuated but vivacious little Jonathan Homer of Newton, who was, to look upon, a kind of expurgated, reduced and Americanized copy of Voltaire, but very unlike him in wickedness or wit.”

Homer (1759–1843) was minister of the first congregation in Newton, where Homer Street preserves his name. Holmes went on:

The good-humored junior member of our family [Holmes himself?] always loved to make him happy by setting him chirruping about Miles Coverdale’s Version, and the Bishop’s Bible, and how he wrote to his friend Sir Isaac (Coffin) about something or other, and how Sir Isaac wrote back that he was very much pleased with the contents of his letter, and so on about Sir Isaac, ad libitum,—for the admiral was his old friend, and he was proud of him.

Homer and Coffin had been classmates at the South Latin School, one becoming an American clergyman and the other a British admiral. Coffin’s recollections of life in that school were invaluable to me in writing about its culture.

The kindly little old gentleman was a collector of Bibles, and made himself believe he thought he should publish a learned Commentary some day or other; but his friends looked for it only in the Greek Calends,—say on the 31st of April, when that should come round, if you would modernize the phrase.

In other words, that magnum opus’s day of publication would never arrive.

Leafing through the “Davenport Letters”

The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia has just unveiled a webpage displaying seventeen letters written by Continental soldiers Isaac How Davenport (1754–1778) and James Davenport (1759–1824) of Dorchester.

The original letters don’t survive, but a nephew copied them into a ledger book, which remains in the family.

The museum is sharing scans of those transcripts as well as P.D.F. files of their text in the raw and with modernized punctuation for easier reading.

I presume the older brother was the “Isaac Davenport” listed among the Dorchester men who responded to the militia alarm on 19 Apr 1775.

Middle names were rarely used in New England at this time. It looks like Isaac How Davenport received his father’s mother’s maiden name, sometimes spelled Howe, as his middle name. In nineteenth-century histories of Dorchester, that man’s name was misprinted as “Isaac Shaw Davenport.”

Isaac became a member of the commander in chief’s guard and then the dragoons under Col. George Baylor. He spent several months of 1777–78 at Valley Forge, where he wrote two of the letters in this collection. Isaac Davenport was among the Continental dragoons killed in a nighttime raid on their billets on 27 Sept 1778.

The younger brother, James, enlisted in the Continental Army in February 1777, when he was seventeen years old, leaving behind an apprenticeship to a shoemaker. He served for the rest of the war, rising to the rank of sergeant in 1780. In 1777–78 he was also at Valley Forge, but his surviving letters start in 1780, getting more numerous late in the war when there was less to do besides write home.

After the war James Davenport returned from New York to Dorchester and used his earnings to build a house, marry, and start a family. He lived long enough to apply for a pension in 1818, sending in copies of his promotion to sergeant and his discharge signed by Gen. George Washington. Many veterans didn’t have such documentation.

The U.S. government initially awarded Davenport a pension, but then rescinded it. I suspect the problem was that Davenport wasn’t poor enough; the pensions of that decade required applicants to show need, and he owned a farm, a house, and cash.

Davenport tried to present himself as in need: “my health is much impaired by my services in the Army,” “My House was built more than 30 years ago,” his wife Esther was prone to illness.

In the end, though, James Davenport’s best claim to public support was his service. He described himself as “engaged at the Capture of Burgoyne, Cornwallis, at Monmouth & always with my Regiment.” (His regiment wasn’t actually at Yorktown.) A later law would have let him keep his pension because it wasn’t need-based, but by then there were fewer veterans to pay for.

After James Davenport died in 1824, Dorchester’s minister, the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris, preached at his interment. The published sermon reportedly “included excerpts from a journal of his wartime experiences.”

The Davenport family had not only preserved that journal until then and the texts of the letters, but also some mementos of James’s military service: a sword, epaulettes (shown above), and a pair of red wool baby booties reportedly made from a British coat. Those are now part of the Museum of the American Revolution’s collection, and can be viewed through the “Davenport Letters” webpage.

“Governor, you might as well take half a dozen grains”

Here’s another sample of what’s reported to be tea from the Boston Tea Party on display in a museum.

Jonathan Lane of Revolution 250 clued me into this little vial of tea leaves last week.

It’s at the Seward House Museum in Auburn, New York. This was the home of William H. Seward, U.S. senator and secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln.

In 1841, when Seward was the governor of New York, he made a visit to Boston. Among the notable places he visited was the Massachusetts Historical Society, then located in the Provident Institution for Savings building on Tremont Street beside the King’s Chapel Burying-Ground.

Seward’s Memoir of His Life and Selections from His Letters, 1831-1846, edited by his son Frederick, described that visit:

…a morning passed in the State-House, and an afternoon at the Athenæum and Historical Society, with their Revolutionary relics, swords, and flags, letters of the colonial patriots, and a sealed bottle of tea.

The old gentleman who was pointing out the curiosities said: “Here is some of the tea which was thrown overboard in the harbor. A broken chest floated ashore near the residence of an old lady, who, though a patriot, thought it a great pity that so much good tea should be wasted, and so locked the ‘treasure-trove’ in her closet. She was forced to use it sparingly and privately, however, to avoid the observation of her neighbors. So it was not all gone before the event became historic and the tea a precious relic. This is some of it.”

That was most likely the tea that the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris donated to the M.H.S. before he died in 1842. However, the story the Sewards recorded is different. The label on Harris’s tea now says those leaves were “gathered up on the Shore of Dorchester Neck,” suggesting they were loose instead of in a chest, and thus probably undrinkable. No mention of an old lady or a broken chest.

The Seward account continues with the “old gentleman” at the M.H.S.:

Just as he was saying this, the bottle slipped from his hand and broke; the tea was scattered on the floor. Hastily gathering it up, and putting the parcel back upon the shelf, he remarked: “There is none lost, and it won’t be hurt by it, but since the bottle is broken, Governor, you might as well take half a dozen grains as mementos of Boston.”

The precious leaves were put into a diminutive vial and taken to Albany.

That seems like a gracious gift for a visiting dignitary, but hardly a good testament to how the M.H.S. of 1841 preserved its historical artifacts.

A Vial of Tea with “a couple of provenances”

Yesterday I discussed three samples of tea that came to Massachusetts museums in the late 1800s, reportedly after men involved in the Boston Tea Party shook those leaves out of their shoes and clothing at the end of the night.

The day before, I discussed three samples of tea that the Rev. Dr. Thaddeus Mason Harris distributed to Massachusetts historical organizations in the early 1800s.

Mason reported that those leaves had been collected from the Dorchester shore the morning after the event, though he didn’t record who did the collecting.

Another sample of tea now in this city comes to us with versions of both stories attached. It’s a vial of liquid tea reportedly brewed from leaves involved in the Tea Party of 1773. The Old North Church owns that artifact, but it’s on loan to the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum.

When the museum put that vial on display in 2018, it issued a press release that said:

The tea, believed to be from The Boston Tea Party, has a couple of provenances.

One allegedly stems from the family of Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris (1768-1842), a Unitarian clergyman who lived in Dorchester, Mass., who, as legend has it, gathered tea as a five-year-old boy when the tea thrown overboard at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773 and was carried by the tide to the beaches of Dorchester Neck Flats. The family purportedly bottled tea in numerous glass vials. Years later, Reverend Harris’ mother, Rebecca Harris (1745-1801), passed a vial of the tea to her daughter Hannah Waite (1780-1845). Since then, the tea (curiously in liquid form) has been passed on numerous times ultimately landing with Old North Church. . . .

Another provenance of the tea, also stemming from the Harris family, was, as legend has it, shaken out of the boot of a participant of The Boston Tea Party on his return home.

Thaddeus Mason Harris’s father, William, died in 1778 while working as paymaster for Col. Henry Jackson’s regiment. His mother, Rebecca (Mason) Harris, married Samuel Wait, Jr., of Malden in 1780. It’s possible Hannah was the first child of that marriage, but the only Hannah Waite listed in Malden’s vital records as born in 1780 was the daughter of another couple.

By that year young Thaddeus was living in other families in Templeton and Shrewsbury, retired ministers who started to prepare him for Harvard College. He kept in touch with his mother, who died in Malden in 1801. Harris was then settled as a minister in Dorchester, and thus might already have come into possession of Boston Tea Party tea. (As I wrote back here, I think it’s quite unlikely Thaddeus picked it up off the shore in 1773, “as legend has it,” since he was a small boy living in another town at the time.)

Alternatively, the stories behind this vial of liquid tea might have been brewed out of the two dominant narratives already established by the late 1800s: that the Rev. Dr. Harris collected some tea, and that some tea came out of a participant’s shoes.

TOMORROW: Orphan samples.

“Tea which fell into the shoes”

The 10 Nov 1821 issue of the Boston Daily Advertiser contained the fifth of a series of short essays headlined “Reminiscences.”

It told readers about the destruction of the East India Company tea in Boston harbor in December 1773, an event not yet dubbed the “Boston Tea Party.” The author wrote:

The destruction was effected by the disguised persons, and some young men who volunteered; one of the latter collected the tea which fell into the shoes of himself and companions, and put it in a phial and sealed it up;—which phial is now in his possession,—containing the same tea.

In 1835 an Independence Day orator identified the man who “preserved a vial full” of tea as Thomas Melvill, who had died three years before.

Twenty-one years later a literary chronicler stated that tea was “found in his shoes on returning from the vessel it was sealed up in a vial, although it was intended that not a particle should escape destruction!”

Back in 2018, I tracked that storied sample of tea to its present repository in Revolutionary Spaces’ Old State House museum.

As a historical artifact, that vial had some advantages over the tea reportedly collected on the Dorchester shore and being distributed to historical organizations by the Rev. Dr. Thaddeus Mason Harris before he died in 1842.

First of all, the Melvill leaves had an unbroken provenance leading back to the tea ships. Harris didn’t record who collected the tea in Dorchester or who gave it to him, but Melvill and his descendants presented a complete chain of custody.

Furthermore, Melvill’s tea came from a participant in the destruction of the cargo, not just someone who woke up the next morning and found wet tea leaves on a beach.

Of course, there was the matter of Melvill preserving tea that he was supposed to destroy. But he’d explained that—he “and companions” had brought home this tea inadvertently. That touch of irony made the story even more savory.

Now either lots of other men brought home tea in their shoes the same way, to be secretly preserved by their families until the late 1800s, or this story became an archetype that several other families duplicated.

For example, there’s a strong tradition that John Crane was part of the Tea Party, and he was certainly part of the right crowd. By 1893 the Bostonian Society was in possession of a:

Tea-caddy, with tea found in the pocket and boots of John Crane, one of the Boston Tea Party, when taken injured to his home, Dec. 16, 1773.

An old photograph of that tea-caddy appears above.

By that same year of 1893, the Essex Institute in Salem had received what a young St. Nicholas correspondent named Peggy described as:

two bottles of the tea that was thrown over board at the Boston tea-party,—it was found in the shoes of Lot Cheever after removing his disguise

The name of Lot Cheever is not otherwise linked to the Tea Party. Indeed, the only Lot Cheever I can find was born in Danvers in 1837. (Ezekiel Cheever was captain of the militia patrol that Bostonians appointed to keep the cargo from being landed on November 30.) Maybe Lot Cheever was the donor of this artifact, not the original creator.

The story of tea leaves coming home with a Tea Partier also appears in Robert Lawson’s novel Mr. Revere & I, in which Paul Revere’s mother shakes out his clothing to increase her supply of caffeine. That shows the appeal of this anecdote.

TOMORROW: Competing traditions.

Thaddeus Mason Harris Passing Out Tea

In 1793, a young Harvard graduate named Thaddeus Mason Harris became the minister of the new Unitarian meeting in Dorchester.

Harris had previously been a schoolteacher and a librarian at Harvard College.

He also claimed to have been offered the position of secretary to George Washington, but there’s no evidence of that and the job wasn’t open at the time.

That’s not the only story in Harris’s biography which I find a little suspect, so I’m more skeptical than usual about historical anecdotes or artifacts that come through him.

However, Harris was a co-founder of and longtime volunteer for the American Antiquarian Society, and active in other historical organizations, so he’s hard to avoid. (Joshua R. Greenberg alerted me to Christen Mucher’s article about Harris’s work on Commonplace last month.)

In particular, Harris spread around samples of tea said to have been collected from the Dorchester shore after the Boston Tea Party. He doesn’t appear to have preserved the name of the person who gave him this tea.

Harris’s own name did remain attached to these relics, however, so often people assume he collected the tea himself. He would have been five years old at the time, living with his family in Charlestown, on the other side of Boston from Dorchester. It seems far more likely that one of the minister’s neighbors or parishioners after he settled in Dorchester gave him this tea.

Harris donated some of that tea to the Massachusetts Historical Society. It rests in a glass jar with paper labels that say:

Tea
that was gathered up on the Shore of Dorchester Neck on the morning after the destruction of the three Cargos at Boston
December 17, 1773

Presented by Rev. Dr. Harris

You can play with a curious digital image of that artifact here.

The Dorchester minister gave another sample to the American Antiquarian Society in 1840, two years before he died. That organization describes its treasure as:

Less than five inches high, the mold-blown, pale aqua bottle filled with tea leaves is wrapped at its mouth with twill tape and sealed with red sealing wax. Its attached paper label reads: “Tea Thrown into Boston Harbor Dec. 16, 1773.”

A second label survives in the handwriting of the A.A.S. secretary in the 1860s with text very similar to the M.H.S. bottle and Harris’s name on it.

This past June, Heritage Auctions sold a third small bottle of tea with a paper label. This one says:

“Tea gathered on the shore at Dorchester Neck the morning after the destruction of the three cargoes December 17” 1773. From
Thaddeus Mason Harris, D.D.

Rec’d from the American Antiquarian Society, March 1895
F. W. Putnam
Part of a lot in a stone jar found at Ant. Soc. among other things

Frederic Ward Putnam (1839–1915) was an anthropologist, first director of the Peabody Museum in his home town of Salem, and curator at the other Peabody Museum at Harvard University.

That sample of tea, deaccessioned in some way from the A.A.S., was passed down in private hands in the twentieth century. When it was sold in June, it fetched $87,500.

TOMORROW: More tea samples.

“To become private secretary to General Washington”?

The Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris (1768-1842) grew up from a poor childhood to regain his family’s place in the cultural establishment of greater Boston. He was the librarian at Harvard College for several years before becoming a Unitarian minister in Dorchester.

And whenever I read the man’s early life life story, I come away feeling dubious.

All the profiles of Harris seem to derive from a letter that the Rev. John Pierce wrote on 1 Mar 1849. One of the anecdotes in that letter is:

On leaving College, he taught a school for a year at Worcester; and, at the end of that time, was applied to, to become General [George] Washington’s Private Secretary. He had consented to serve; but, in consequence of taking the small pox, he was prevented from entering at once on the duties of the place, and it was filled by Tobias Lear.

Using Pierce’s letter, the Rev. Nathaniel L. Frothingham wrote a longer reminiscence for the Massachusetts Historical Society. Here’s his version of the same anecdote:

He was graduated at Harvard College in July, 1787, at the age of nineteen. . . . After completing his collegiate course, he became the teacher of a school in Worcester. In this service he remained for a year; and here he formed the acquaintance of Miss Mary, the only daughter of Dr. Elijah and Mrs. Dorothy Dix, who was to be the partner of his whole life.

Immediately on leaving this pleasant town, he was honored by an application to become private secretary to General Washington. His heart leaped at such a proposal, which promised to bring him into connection with the greatest man of his nation and time, and with the leading events of a wonderful era in the fortunes of his country and the destinies of the earth. His patriotism and his skill with the pen, his love of history and of poetry both, conspired to recommend such a preferment, and promised to open a career for his highest aspirations. Now the course of his life seemed to be beaten out for him in high places, and the motto of his ring was translating itself into distinct prophecy.

But no sooner had he signified his acceptance of the appointment than he was struck down with that terrible malady, the small-pox, which at that time had been relieved of only the smaller half of its original terrors. Public affairs cannot wait for the slow recoveries of sickness and for private convenience; and before he was able to arrive at his post the place was filled by Tobias Lear, a gentleman who left the University the same year that young Harris entered it, and who afterwards went through a long course of diplomatic service as Consul-General at St. Domingo and at Tripoli.

In 1788, Lear had already been Washington’s secretary for four years; he wasn’t second choice to Harris. Lear also remained in Washington’s employ through 1793, moving with the first President to New York and Philadelphia, so there’s no sign of an opening.

I’ve seen no mention of Harris in Washington’s correspondence. And if someone at Mount Vernon wrote to Harris asking him to become the general’s closest employee, as Pierce and Frothingham understood, that would surely have left a paper trail.

Questions on a Silver Mug

Yet another news story with Revolutionary roots appeared in last Sunday’s Boston Globe, this time in the arts news. As Linda Matchan reported, officials in the Massachusetts Treasurer’s office found a mug made in the early eighteen century by Boston silversmith Andrew Tyler in an abandoned safe-deposit box. The Museum of Fine Arts has now acquired the item from the heir of the couple who had rented that box.

The article states:

The mug, it appears, was made by Tyler sometime in the early to mid-1700s for a highly-placed local judge named Robert Auchmuty Jr., famous for being one of the defense attorneys during the Boston Massacre, with co-counsel John Adams.

For reasons unknown, Auchmuty relinquished it. “He had to leave Boston in a hurry because he was a loyalist; he got the boot,” said Harris. “It’s possible the mug went from his family to mine when he had to leave. It might have been a fire sale situation.”

Somehow it ended up in the possession of Harris’s ancestor, Thaddeus Mason Harris, a Unitarian minister who grew up in Charlestown. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, the British burned Charlestown and the family fled from their home with only a few prized possessions, including the mug.

The source of that information appears to be the handwritten note found with the mug, which goes all the way back to...1976. And I see a number of reasons to do some more research. The details of that story don’t connect.

First, in the video that accompanies the Globe story, M.F.A. curator Gerry Ward estimates that Andrew Tyler made the mug about 1730; at the latest, he must have finished before 1741, when he died. The Robert Auchmuty described above was born about 1723, so he was still in his teens when Tyler made the mug. Perhaps the first owner was actually that man’s father, also called Judge Robert Auchmuty (but a judge on the Massachusetts Superior Court rather than the Vice Admiralty Court).

Yet another complication: Ward states on the video that the initials on the mug’s bottom are “M over T E,” and obviously expects those to be the initials of its first owner. So how is Auchmuty connected?

Then there’s the fact that the Loyalist Robert Auchmuty was living in Roxbury until 1774. The Harrises were living on the other side of Boston and the other side of the Charles River. It seems unlikely that their paths would casually cross, and I don’t see any sign of a family relationship.

The Harris family fled from Charlestown before the Battle of Bunker Hill, as did most of their neighbors; nobody wanted to be caught in the war zone. This is how the move is described in what appears to be the earliest biography of Harris, a letter written in 1849 by a clerical colleague:

After the first hostile demonstrations on the part of the mother country, at Lexington, fears were entertained for the safety of Charlestown; so that, just before the battle of Bunker Hill, Mr. [William] Harris fled, with his family, in the hope that they might somewhere find a refuge from the threatening danger.

Accordingly, with a few necessary articles of clothing, such as they could carry in their hands, they set out on foot,—Thaddeus, then not quite seven years old, leading his twin sisters next in age to himself, the father and mother each carrying a child, and an aged grandmother also making one of the company. They spent the first night at Lexington with a remote relative [another biography says at Munroe’s Tavern]; and, while there, an empty wagon was about leaving, in which they bespoke a passage to any place to which the owner was bound.

Accordingly, they were carried to Chookset, part of Sterling, where Mr. Harris took a small house, and supported his family by keeping a district school. Meanwhile, he went to Charlestown, and brought away a few articles of value which he had left behind. But soon the Battle of Bunker Hill took place, Charlestown was laid in ashes, and the house of Mr. Harris, with whatever of its contents remained, was demolished.

Shortly after this, he joined the Army as Captain and Paymaster; and, on a visit to his family, died of a fever, October 30, 1778, aged thirty-four years.

So even if William Harris did acquire the silver mug before Bunker Hill, it wasn’t there during the battle.

Furthermore, those biographies go on to describe Thaddeus Mason Harris’s poverty after his father died: living with one relative or benefactor after another, begging lunch from schoolmates after giving his own food to his mother, and making brooms, axe-handles, and cat-gut to pay his way toward Harvard. If the family had recently acquired a silver mug with no sentimental value, why didn’t they sell it?

It seems more likely to me that Harris came by the mug in middle age, when he was a minister in Dorchester. During that time he wrote many books and was a leading Freemason. He later served as Librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society. If I’d had a bit of old silver from Roxbury to sell, the Rev. Mr. Harris might well have struck me as a likely customer.