“To hear the proclamation for independance read and proclamed”

On 18 July 1776, 250 years ago today, the Declaration of Independence was officially proclaimed in Massachusetts.

People had already heard about the Continental Congress’s vote, and many had probably read the Declaration in newspapers. But this was a governmental ceremony. It happened in two places, and on two levels.

With no governor, the highest executive authority in Massachusetts was the Council. Most of its members were meeting in the Edmund Fowle house in Watertown.

Therefore, one part of the official reading was performed by Council secretary Perez Morton, reading the Declaration to the Council and to a crowd gathered outside. Also present were delegates from the Mi’kmaq and St. John’s/Maliseet communities, ready to sign a treaty of friendship with this new United States.

In Boston, there was a parallel, larger ceremony. Inside the Council’s chamber in what was now the State House, Suffolk County sheriff William Greenleaf read the Declaration to some Council members and other officials.

Col. Thomas Crafts of the Massachusetts artillery regiment, who had a bellowing voice, then “deaconed” or repeated the text phrase by phrase from the balcony of the Council chamber to the crowd gathered on the street below.

Thus, most Bostonians at the event heard Col. Crafts’s reading, but the official proclamation in Boston came from Sheriff Greenleaf. The ceremony was meant for both government officials and the “people out of doors.”

On 21 July, Abigail Adams reported to her husband:

Last Thursday after hearing a very Good Sermon I went with the Multitude into Kings Street to hear the proclamation for independance read and proclamed. Some Field peices with the Train were brought there, the troops appeard under Arms and all the inhabitants assembled there (the small pox prevented many thousand from the Country).

When Col. Crafts read from the Belcona of the State House the Proclamation, great attention was given to every word. As soon as he ended, the cry from the Belcona, was God Save our American States and then 3 cheers which rended the air, the Bells rang, the privateers fired, the forts and Batteries, the cannon were discharged, the platoons followed and every face appeard joyfull.

Mr. [James] Bowdoin [a senior member of the Council] then gave a Sentiment, Stability and perpetuity to American independance.

After dinner the kings arms were taken down from the State House and every vestage of him from every place in which it appeard and burnt in King Street. Thus ends royall Authority in this State, and all the people shall say Amen.

Not everyone was entirely pleased. Merchant John Rowe characterized the celebration as “a Great Confusion in Town.”

Pulling the royal emblems of the lion and unicorn down from the State House roof was probably inspired by reports of New Yorkers toppling the statue of King George III after that city’s reading of the Declaration on 9 July. But the street was still called King Street until 1784.

The Laboratory beside Boston Common

As described in The Road to Concord, Boston’s South Writing School shared a fenced-in yard with the militia train’s newer gunhouse.

In September 1774, the two small brass cannon stored in that gunhouse disappeared, even as British regulars stood guard at its door.

Frustrated Royal Artillery men hauled away the rest of the train’s equipment. Then came the outbreak of war, the siege, the evacuation. And Boston had it gunhouse back.

Except it didn’t have the train’s guns anymore. The town meeting sent a committee of Thomas Crafts, Paul Revere, and Thomas Marshall to ask Gen. George Washington for those brass cannon, but they were already on their way to the New York theater.

The state military establishment scrounged up more cannon, mostly old iron guns abandoned by the British military. But those weapons were in demand, needed to arm ships and guard the harbors. Leaving them in a building beside the Common didn’t make sense.

What do you do with a gunhouse that has no guns to house? We can see the answer in a report in the 15 Aug 1776 New England Chronicle about how the town celebrated the eleventh anniversary of the first Stamp Act protest: “a Detachment of the Train of Artillery, with two Field Pieces, marched from the Laboratory into King-Street.” 

The gunhouse was turned into a “Laboratory” or workshop for making weapons, especially artillery equipment. On 3 December the Massachusetts House formally discussed how “to have a laboratory established,” but even before its committee finished its work the 27 Jan 1777 Boston Gazette was telling readers to find Col. Thomas Crafts “at the Laboratory” if they wanted to store their gunpowder.

Crafts had been second-in-command of the train before the war. He’d tried for the rank of artillery colonel in the Continental Army in late 1775 but was rebuffed. Massachusetts then made him colonel of its own artillery regiment, and that job included overseeing the Castle and “the Laboratory on the Common.”

The man running that workshop was William Burbeck (1715–1785, represented above by his gravestone on Copp’s Hill). He had been storekeeper of ordnance at Castle William until the war broke out, then slipped away to become lieutenant-colonel and second-in-command of the Continental artillery regiment under Col. Richard Gridley.

At the end of the siege of Boston, Burbeck informed Gen. Washington that his commission came from Massachusetts, not the Continental Congress. He would therefore stay in Massachusetts, not heading down to New York (or serving further under Col. Henry Knox, thirty-five years his junior).

Burbeck immediately went to work improving Massachusetts’s military supplies. By 18 Apr 1776, the Massachusetts General Court discussed how to supply him “with Powder, wherewith, to prove the Cannon lately Cast for the Use of the Colony.” A year later, he was chosen as the Continental agent to inspect gunpowder.

In the spring of 1778 the state legislature approved regulations for the laboratory in Boston, and that October it unanimously chose Burbeck to be “Comptroller of the Laboratory.” 

A year later, the legislature appointed Burbeck captain-lieutenant of the Castle (under John Hancock as captain of the castle, who was soon more busy as governor). Burbeck remained comptroller of the laboratory, but in early 1782 the General Court determined that work had “greatly decreased,” so it adjusted his pay accordingly while still making him responsible for the facility.

These days we might raise questions about having a weapons workshop, possibly used for testing gunpowder, right next to a school. But the people of newly independent Boston didn’t see a problem. What could go wrong?

TOMORROW: Fire!

The Samuel Maverick Inquest

Three of the people shot in the Boston Massacre died almost immediately: Crispus Attucks, James Caldwell, and Samuel Gray.

The soldiers’ guns also wounded several men and boys, and by the next morning one of those had died: seventeen-year-old Samuel Maverick.

On 6 Mar 1770, Thomas Crafts convened his second coroner’s inquest in two days to consider Maverick’s case. While the jury that had looked into Caldwell’s death included some prominent Bostonians and the victim’s employer, this men on this second jury appear more typical: ordinary citizens from the neighborhood.

The foreman was Benjamin Harrod. The town had two men by that name, father and son. The father owned the building where Henry Knox rented space for his bookstore in 1775. After the war they moved to Haverhill and Newburyport, respectively.

Harrod and his thirteen fellow jurors determined that Maverick had died after a “Musket Bullet entered into his Belly and lodged between his Ribs.” Later Crafts produced that musket ball in court, according to the notes of John Adams.

Samuel Maverick had worked for and lived with Isaac Greenwood, an ivory turner in the North End. The teen-aged apprentice shared a bed with Greenwood’s nine-year-old son John, a notable voice in this week’s American Revolution documentary on P.B.S.

Two years after the Massacre, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson appointed Isaac Greenwood to be another coroner in Suffolk County.

The Jury for the James Caldwell Inquest

As I wrote yesterday, I now lean toward housewright Thomas Crafts, Sr., being one of the Suffolk County coroners who responded to the Boston Massacre rather than his namesake son.

In fact, Thomas Crafts was apparently the first coroner to act. His date on the inquest into the death of James Caldwell is “the Fifth Day of March” in 1770. In other words, his jury convened, examined the evidence, and issued their determination in the immediate hours after the shooting.

Decades later, Benjamin Bussey Thacher interviewed the shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes about how the crowd on King Street had carried away Caldwell’s body:

Caldwell, who was shot in the back, was standing by the side of Hewes at that moment, and the latter caught him in his arms as he fell, and was one of those who bore him up to Mr. [Alexander] Young’s, the Jail-House in Prison Lane. He…was at this time second mate of a vessel commanded by Capt. Morton. This man lived in Cold Lane, and Hewes ran down directly to his house, from Young’s, and told him what had happened. The corpse soon followed him. . . . Morton…looked upon the dreadful object, and shouted like a madman for a gun, to run out “and kill a regular”…

The 12 March Boston Gazette reported that Caldwell was buried out of Faneuil Hall alongside Crispus Attucks as a “stranger,” a detail later histories repeat. But the 19 March issue said: “In the account of the funeral procession in our last, it should have been said, James Caldwell was borne from the House of Capt. Morton in Cold-Lane, instead of Faneuil Hall.”

Way back in 2006, the first year of this blog, I identified that sea captain as Thomas Morton. (Over a decade later came the Boston Massacre Sestercentennial commemoration in the Old South Meeting House. That was a weird event, on the lip of the pandemic shutdown when we were all wondering whether we should gather at all. But the weirdest moment for me was hearing a speaker identify Caldwell as Capt. Thomas Morton’s mate and flashing back to when I’d drilled down to find that name.)

I was therefore struck by seeing Thomas Morton’s signature among the members of the coroner’s jury examining James Caldwell’s body. Clearly he was emotionally involved in that death. Nonetheless, coroner Crafts made him part of the inquest. Maybe that was a way to calm Morton down, letting him respond to the young man’s killing in a productive way.

Other members of this jury were prominent Bostonians. The foreman was town treasurer David Jeffries. His son, Dr. John Jeffries, was a juror, months before he testified as a defense witness for the soldiers. William Dorrington, keeper of the smallpox hospital, was another.

Other members of this coroner’s jury included:

• Samuel Gridley. In his testimony for the Short Narrative report, the apothecary Richard Palmes said he “followed Mr. Gridley with several other persons with the body of Capt. Morton's apprentice, up to the prison house.” Did that “Mr. Gridley” stay around to serve on the inquest jury?
• Nathan Spear, whose younger brother Pool Spear was in the crowd on King Street and offered testimony against the soldiers.
• Samuel Franklin (1721–1775), cutler. On 8 June, his first cousin once removed Benjamin Franklin wrote from London: “I received your kind letter of the 23d of March. I was happy to find that neither you, nor any of your family, were in the way of those murderers.” 

The verdict those fourteen men delivered to coroner Crafts: Caldwell was “murdered by a Musquet Ball shot thro’ his Body, & another Ball lodged in his Shoulder.” At first the men said the culprit was unknown, but then they revised the form to read “the Murderer a Soldier to us unknown.”

Considering Thomas Crafts the Coroner

As recounted yesterday, two documents at the Boston Public Library establish that one of the coroners holding inquiries after the Boston Massacre was Thomas Crafts.

Does that evidence restore that milestone in my mental narrative of Thomas Crafts, Jr.’s rise from a member of the Loyall Nine to artillery colonel and judge in the new republic?

Unfortunately not. Because, as the name implies, Thomas Crafts, Jr., wasn’t the only Thomas Crafts in Boston in 1770.

Thomas Crafts, Sr. (1706–1789), was a housewright of standing. He had moved into Boston from Roxbury and joined the First Baptist Meeting. He and his wife Anne had seven children between 1729 and 1752. Starting in 1745 he held town offices like surveyor of boards, fence viewer, and warden. In 1766 he got the contract to frame the new town jail.

In contrast to his father, Thomas Crafts, Jr. (1740–1799), was a decorative painter. At the time of the Massacre, he was still only twenty-nine years old. He married Frances Pinkney Gore in 1763, and they had two children by 1770. Thomas, Jr., was a member of the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons and an officer in the militia artillery company. He was on his way up. But he wasn’t yet a respected elder.

Back here I noted that The Massachusetts Civil List for the Colonial and Provincial Periods, 1630-1774 didn’t list any Thomas Crafts among the Boston coroners in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. But that book did list Thomas Crofts, who could be our man. (The Crafts family genealogy notes Craft and Crofts as alternate spellings used in the 1600s.)

If Gov. Francis Bernard appointed Thomas Crofts/Crafts as a coroner in 1761, that definitely wasn’t Thomas, Jr., since he was barely legal at the time. But Thomas, Sr., was then fifty-five years old, the sort of weighty neighbor whom people would trust as a coroner.

Did Crafts the coroner fill out the verdict forms himself? If so, then we could compare his handwriting and the signature on the fifth line to other documents by the two Craftses.

Until such additional evidence arises, I’ll make my best guess based on the social evidence and say that Thomas Crafts the coroner of 1770 was the housewright father, in his mid-sixties with experience in several town offices. He was an example to his sons, but Thomas, Jr., hadn’t yet achieved the same political stature.

TOMORROW: Examining the coroners’ examinations.

The Coroners Who Oversaw Inquests after the Boston Massacre

The most famous piece of coroners’ paperwork from the Boston Massacre is a verdict from the inquest into the death of Michael Johnson—or Crispus Attucks, as he was soon to be identified.

That document is in the collection of Revolutionary Spaces and has been on display in the Old State House. It’s been reproduced and transcribed in several places. Here’s an article about its conservation.

The coroner for that proceeding was Robert Pierpont, a Whig who lived at the far southern end of town.

I knew that the Boston Public Library’s Special Collections Department holds several more inquest documents. Mellen Chamberlain collected those papers for the library in the late 1800s, for both their historical value and their autographs.

Last last month, therefore, I made an appointment to look at the Chamberlain Manuscripts. I’ve done research at the B.P.L. for years, but the Special Collections Department upgraded its facilities and tightened its procedures since my last visit, so this required making an appointment and learning some new procedures.

I’m pleased to report that I found the verdicts of two inquests overseen by coroner Thomas Crafts. One examined the body of James Caldwell on 5 Mar 1770, and the second examined Samuel Maverick the next day.

In addition, Chamberlain acquired verdicts from two inquests headed by Thomas Dawes (shown above). He handled the cases of Samuel Gray (6 March) and Patrick Carr (15 March).

The collection also includes testimony for the Gray inquest from Richard Palmes, Robert Goddard, Joseph Petty, and Richard Ward, plus a deposition about aggressive soldiers from John Leach, Jr., that Dawes took in on 6 March. All but one of those witnesses also testified for Boston’s Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre report or the trials or both. (Frankly, they couldn’t shut Palmes up.)

Thus, we should list Thomas Dawes among the coroners who did the first investigations of the Boston Massacre. In fact, he did more than Pierpont, and more evidence from his inquiries survive.

TOMORROW: So am I satisfied that Thomas Crafts, Jr., was a coroner in 1770?

“Mr. Craft producd the Ball in Court”

Yesterday I showed a list of the men appointed as coroners in Suffolk County from 1747 to 1774. And that list made me nervous.

For nearly two decades now I’ve been writing that Thomas Crafts, Jr., member of the Loyall Nine and reader of the Declaration of Independence on 18 July 1776, was a coroner at the time of the Boston Massacre.

In my mind, that position showed how he was rising in society from the middling mechanical class into gentility, and how he was involved in all the political events of his time.

I think I saw that statement first in The Legal Papers of John Adams. Volume III quotes thus from John Adams’s notes on the soldiers’ trial for the Massacre: “Mr. Craft producd the Ball in Court.” A footnote adds: “The reference is probably to Thomas Crafts, the Suffolk County Coroner, and is presumably JA’s note, not the witness’ testimony.”

Hiller B. Zobel, one of the editors of those Adams papers, shortly afterward wrote in The Boston Massacre about the morning of 6 Mar 1770: “County Coroners Robert Pierpoint and Thomas Crafts were arranging for inquests on Johnson and the other victims.”

Note, however, that the only primary source I had on hand referred to “Mr. Craft” with no given name.

Now look back at the list of coroners yesterday, from The Massachusetts Civil List for the Colonial and Provincial Periods, 1630-1774. The name “Thomas Crafts” doesn’t appear anywhere.

There was a “Thomas Crofts” appointed or reappointed on 5 Nov 1761, and that could be an easy error for “Thomas Crafts.” But it could just as easily be an easy error for “Thomas Cross,” first named on 18 Apr 1749.

Furthermore, William Crafts was made a coroner on 11 Apr 1768. Based just on that list, the coroner called “Mr. Craft” in Adams’s notes would be William, not Thomas. Indeed, that list offers no confirmation Thomas Crafts, Jr., was ever appointed a coroner at all.

Newspapers also reported the governors’ appointments of new coroners in formulaic lines, as in the 18 June 1772 Boston News-Letter:

At a General Council held on Thursday the 4th of June Instant [i.e., of this month], at Boston, His Excellency the Governor was pleased to nominate,…

Thomas Allen, Esq; to be a Justice of the Peace for the County of Suffolk.

Mr. Isaac Greenwood, to be a Coroner for said County…

To which Nominations His Majesty’s Council did advise and consent.

(All the new justices of the peace were labeled “Esq.” while the coroners were ordinarily “Mr.,” showing the gap in prestige between the two offices.)

I couldn’t find such a newspaper item for Thomas Crafts, Jr., however. (Nor for the other Crafts/Crofts/Cross coroners discussed above.)

Thus, at the beginning of this month I was contemplating the possibility that Thomas Crafts, Jr., wasn’t a coroner in 1770 after all. I needed to see some original documents.

TOMORROW: To the archives!

From “Loyall Nine” to “Sons of Liberty”

We have a reasonably good idea of who eight of Boston’s “Loyall Nine” were:

• John Avery, Jr., distiller and merchant
• Thomas Chase, distiller
• Thomas Crafts, Jr., painter
• John Smith, brazier
• Stephen Cleverly, brazier
• Henry Bass, jeweler
• George Trott, jeweler
• Benjamin Edes, printer

In addition, the ship masters Henry Wells and Joseph Field were also lumped in with this group by different contemporaries.

Within months after they started organizing anti–Stamp Act protests, the group appears to have adopted another name. Back during Parliament’s debate over that law, opponent Isaac Barré called American colonists “Sons of Liberty,” as reported to this side of the Atlantic by Jared Ingersoll. By the fall the “Loyall Nine” started using that phrase.

The handbills that Bass described the group printing in his December 1765 letter said: ”The True-born Sons of Liberty, are desired to meet under LIBERTY-TREE, at XII o’Clock, THIS DAY…” Evidently any man could merit that label by coming out to resist the new tax from London. In early 1766 the phrase also started to appear in newspapers in other ports.

But the group also used that term for themselves. In January 1766 John Adams called them “the Sons of Liberty.” On 15 February, Crafts wrote to Adams that “the Sons of Liberty Desired your Company at Boston Next Wensday.” Those are clearly references to a specific group, not to everyone taking a certain political stand.

It looks like the more general use won out. By August 1769, “An Alphabetical List of the Sons of Liberty who din’d at Liberty Tree [Tavern], Dorchester” included 300 names. Clearly those Sons of Liberty weren’t just the “Loyall Nine”—though all eight men listed above were there.

Nonetheless, because of some unsubstantiated claims and portrayals in popular culture, the belief persists that the Sons of Liberty was an identifiable group of activists, not a mass movement, as I’ve written before. Because of that squishiness, I tend not to use the term. But of course it’s strongly associated with the Revolution.

TOMORROW: Back to the bowl.

Counting the “Loyall Nine”

In a 19 Dec 1765 letter divulging details about Boston’s latest Stamp Act protest, and earlier ones, Henry Bass wrote of the organizers as “the Loyall Nine.” He added:

And upon the Occasion we that Evg. had a very Genteel Supper provided to which we invited your very good friends Mr. S[amuel] A[dams] and E[des] & G[ill] and three or four others and spent the Evening in a very agreable manner Drinkg Healths etc.

On 15 Jan 1766 John Adams wrote in his diary:

Spent the Evening with the Sons of Liberty, at their own Apartment in Hanover Square, near the Tree of Liberty. It is a Compting Room in Chase & Speakmans Distillery. A very small Room it is.

John Avery Distiller or Merchant, of a liberal Education, John Smith the Brazier, Thomas Crafts the Painter, Edes the Printer, Stephen Cleverly the Brazier, [Thomas] Chase the Distiller, Joseph Field Master of a Vessell, Henry Bass, George Trott Jeweller, were present.

I was invited by Crafts and Trott, to go and spend an Evening with them and some others, Avery was mentioned to me as one.

Finally, in 1788 the Rev. William Gordon wrote in his history of the Revolution about the first anti-Stamp protest, back in August 1765:

Messrs. John Avery, jun. Thomas Crafts, John Smith, Henry Welles, Thomas Chace, Stephen Cleverly, Henry Bass, and Benjamin Edes…provide and hang out early in the morning of August the fourteenth, upon the limb of a large old elm, toward the entrance of Boston, over the most public street, two effigies,…

Those sources, which were published in reverse chronological order, all seem to refer to the same group of men. The lists of names overlap—but not exactly.

Bass said there were nine men, and seemed to treat Samuel Adams, Edes, and Gill all as guests. Gordon named eight men, including Edes among them. John Adams also listed Edes in the group, and he treated George Trott, not on Gordon’s list, as in the group.

John Adams didn’t list Henry Wells from Gordon’s list (though Tea Leaves and some subsequent books misquote him as doing so). Instead, Adams named Joseph Field, saying he was a ship captain. According to mentions in the Boston press before he died in 1768, Henry Wells was also a ship captain. Would either of them have been in town long enough to help plan protests? 

It’s therefore difficult to say exactly who the “Loyall Nine” were, but there was definitely a political club supping at the Chase distillery near Liberty Tree and organizing the protests under that tree.

TOMORROW: A change of names?

“They all to a Man refus’d taking the Oath”

William Molineux refused to pay the £6 fine the Massachusetts Superior Court imposed on him for refusing jury duty in the fall of 1773.

Publicly, that was because Molineux was protesting how Chief Justice Peter Oliver accepted (or at that point not denying that he would accept) a salary from the Crown rather than the people of Massachusetts.

Privately, Molineux might have had another reason: he was in debt to Boston for £300 for money advanced for a public-works venture.

In February 1774, as the Massachusetts General Court moved to impeach Oliver, the merchant petitioned that legislature to block this fine on his behalf. The assembly declined to take action for Molineux alone.

On 28 July, Gov. Thomas Gage wrote to Chief Justice Oliver from Salem about how Molineux had still not paid his fine for refusing jury duty. He promised to support the judges if they demanded that £6 and threatened to jail the merchant.

But in August 1774 Parliament’s new Massachusetts Government Act made even more people refuse to cooperate with the court system under Oliver.

In the western counties, popular protest took the form of hundreds of men massing around the courthouses and keeping the justices out.

Bostonians didn’t dare to do that since their streets were once again patrolled by redcoat soldiers. So on 30 August they emulated Molineux’s refusal.

William Tudor (shown above later in life) wrote to his mentor in the law, John Adams, on 3 September:

Tuesday the Superior Court opened and Mr. Oliver took his Seat as chief Justice. When the grand Jury were called upon to be sworn they all to a Man refus’d taking the Oath, for Reasons committed to Paper, which they permitted the Court, after some Altercation, to read.

The Petit Jury unanimously followed the Example of the Grand Jury; their Reasons together with the others You will read in the Masstts. Spy.

The jurors’ protests were also published as handbills by Edes and Gill. Among the grand jurors were longtime activists Thomas Crafts and Paul Revere, John Hancock’s younger brother Ebenezer, and William Thompson, whose granddaughter supplied the texts to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1875.

In different ways the grand and petit jurors pointed to these reasons:

• The General Court had impeached Chief Justice Oliver.
• The Massachusetts Government Act had taken control of the courts from the people and put them under the Crown.
• Justices Oliver, Foster Hutchinson, and William Browne had accepted seats on the Council, now appointed under the new law instead of elected by the legislature as the charter specified.

The judges, attorneys, and young men waiting to be admitted to the Boston bar (like Tudor) tried to figure out what to do.

TOMORROW: The last court session.

“I could almost wish that an inoculating Hospital was opened, in every Town”

In the Washington Post, Prof. Andrew Wehrman wrote about Massachusetts and Boston’s official response to the threat of smallpox in the summer of 1776:

Abigail Adams…learned of the Continental Army’s failed invasion of Canada. Smallpox had broken out among the soldiers, dooming the campaign. Returning soldiers threatened to bring the disease back with them. Exasperated, John wrote to Abigail: “The Small Pox! The Small Pox! What shall we do with it?” He answered his own question by remarking, “I could almost wish that an inoculating Hospital was opened, in every Town in New England.”

While John Adams and 55 other men in Philadelphia debated the final wording of the Declaration of Independence, on July 3, 1776, the people of Boston declared their independence from smallpox. Fearing further outbreaks, the Massachusetts legislature voted to once again shut down the entire city for a general inoculation.

The people of Boston cheered the news. Ezekiel Price, a local businessman and court official, declared on July 4: “Liberty given for to inoculate for the small-pox; many begin upon it this afternoon.”

Abigail Adams took her four children to her uncle’s house to inoculate with the families of her two sisters. Guardhouses were built to warn anyone entering the city of the presence of smallpox and to prevent anyone from leaving the city during the general inoculation without a certificate from a doctor.

On July 18, 1776, Col. Thomas Crafts read the Declaration of Independence for the first time to the people of Boston from the balcony of the State House. Abigail Adams joined the “multitude into King Street to hear the proclamation.” The assembled crowd was composed of recently inoculated Bostonians and those with previous immunity who had stayed behind to take care of the rest. . . .

Boston’s “freedom summer” ended on Sept. 18, 1776, when the city ordered the guardhouses closed and the city to reopen for business. Although statistics were not immediately published, 20 years later, Thomas Pemberton, a businessman and member of the newly founded Massachusetts Historical Society, compiled the numbers. In the summer of 1776, Boston saw 29 deaths from 304 cases of natural smallpox. By contrast, only 28 deaths were reported with 4,988 Bostonians inoculated. Ninety percent of Boston’s nonimmune population was inoculated, saving hundreds of lives.

The implications for how our population should respond today are obvious. Some choose to reject them.

The Landlord of Liberty Tree

This is how the merchant John Rowe described Boston’s first public protest against the Stamp Act in his diary:

A Great Number of people assembled at Deacon Elliots Corner this morning to see the Stamp Officer hung in Effigy with a Libel on the Breast, on Deacon Elliot’s tree…

The great elm that held the effigy and provided shade for that protest hadn’t yet been dubbed Liberty Tree. In the coming months, the Sons of Liberty would come up with that name, hammer a plaque into the side of the tree, and make it a political gathering-point. As of mid-August 1765, however, that elm was still “Deacon Elliot’s tree.” And who was he?

As far back as May 1733, when the Boston town meeting debated setting up official marketplaces, one of the proposed sites was “near the great Tree, at the South-End, near Mr. Eliot’s House.” When the 31 May Boston News-Letter reported on that hotly contested vote (364 yeas to 339 nays), it referred to “the great Trees at the South End.” That phrase suggests that there were multiple large trees near Eliot’s house, but one particularly big one. It had probably been growing there for over a century, since before Englishmen came to the Shawmut peninsula.

As for clues about “Deacon Elliot,” this advertisement appeared in the 17 June 1734 New-England Weekly Journal:

TO BE LETT,
A Good convenient House, adjoyning the South Market place, with a large Garden in good Order; Inquire of Mr. John Eliot Stationer, living near the great Trees.

When proposals for publishing an American Magazine went around in 1743, “Mr. John Eliot, at the great Trees at the South-End,” was one of the men collecting subscriptions (along with “Mr. Benja. Franklin, Post Master in Philadelphia”).

John Eliot was born in 1692, a descendant of some of Boston’s earliest British settlers. He was a great-nephew of the famous Rev. John Eliot, “Apostle to the Indians.” The young man appears to have followed his uncle Benjamin Eliot (1665-1741) into the business of bookbinding and stationery sales. He also commissioned small books from printers, almost all sermons and other religious literature. As early as 1716 Eliot was issuing these publications “at his shop at the south-end.”

It appears Eliot inherited that land in the South End, as well as property out in Brookline. In 1708, when the Boston selectmen laid out the southernmost stretch of the main road through town, they defined Orange Street as from the old Neck fortifications to the Eliot house. With, presumably, the great elms nearby.

As he neared the age of thirty, Eliot married Sarah Holyoke. Her brother, the Rev. Edward Holyoke, was a Marblehead minister who became president of Harvard College. The Eliots had eight children between 1721 and 1735.

In the early decades of the eighteenth century, the south end of Boston was still sparsely populated. Then the Hollis Street Meetinghouse was built for the Rev. Mather Byles in 1732. The town opened its south market, and soon the area had more houses and streets. We can see that growth in how Eliot’s title pages described his business:

• “at his shop, the south end of the town,” 1724
• “in Orange Street at the south end of the town,” 1734
• “near the South Market,” 1741

Even after the consolidation of Boston’s marketplaces at Faneuil Hall in 1743, the neighborhood grew.

Deacon Eliot’s big trees remained a handy landmark for people entering or navigating town. Newspaper advertisements tell us Josiah Quincy, Sr., lived “opposite to the great Trees, at the South End,” until he struck it rich in privateering and moved to a country estate in Braintree. Other sites in the neighborhood included the house of auctioneer and deacon Benjamin Church, Sr.; the leather workshop of Adam Colson; and a building once called “the Half-Moon, or Land-Bank House.”

Isaiah Thomas later wrote of Eliot:

He published a few books, and was, many years, a bookseller and binder, but his concerns were not extensive. However, he acquired some property; and being a respectable man, was made deacon of the church in Hollis street.

Thomas simply missed the period when Eliot was most active in publishing. After his uncle’s death in 1741, the deacon appears to have cut back on new ventures and lived off his real estate and shop.

Sarah Eliot died in 1755 at the age of sixty. Deacon John Eliot was then sixty-three years old. He married again to a woman named Mary, then in her forties, but she died in 1761. The deacon’s daughters Sarah and Silence remained unmarried, so one or both might have kept house for him after that.

In August 1765, as described yesterday, the Loyall Nine used the boughs of Deacon Eliot’s tree to hang Andrew Oliver in effigy. The figures of several other royal appointees and political enemies followed in the subsequent years. The Sons of Liberty put up a flagpole beside the tree and raised a banner—the Union Jack on a red field—to call public gatherings. Christopher Seider’s funeral train stopped at the tree. So did the processions of men being tarred and feathered.

The way people referred to the tree as belonging to Deacon Eliot suggests it stood on his property with the branches extending over the street. It’s not clear how near Eliot’s house was to the tree, or whether he had a fence around his land. (The picture above was created decades after the tree was cut down in 1775, and there’s no way to know how accurate it was.) How did Eliot feel about the large political gatherings right outside his house? About his property being identified with rebellion?

Though Eliot doesn’t show up on the records as an active Whig, he does seem to have supported that cause and accepted the new identity for the elm outside his house. The 10 Apr 1769 Boston Gazette included an advertisement saying that land and “a large Building thereon, commonly known by the Name of the South Market,” was to be sold by court order. Prospective buyers were invited to “inquire of John Eliot at Liberty-Tree.”

On 14 August that year, the elderly deacon was among the many local dignitaries who dined with Boston’s Sons of Liberty at Lemuel Robinson’s tavern in Dorchester. In 1770, when William Billings advertised his New-England Psalm-Singer, one of the of the four places where people could buy it was “Deacon Elliot’s under Liberty-Tree.”

By that time, Deacon Eliot was in his late seventies. He didn’t live to see all that his elm tree inspired. On 22 Nov 1771, the Boston News-Letter ran this death notice:

Last Thursday died here, Mr. John Eliot, Deacon of the Church under the Pastoral Care of the the Rev’d Dr. Byles—He justly sustain’d the Character of an Honest Man, and a good Christian—His Remains were decently interr’d on Saturday last.

Three days later an ad in the Boston Gazette called on people with debts to settle with Eliot’s estate to meet with the administrators, Joseph Eliot and Thomas Crafts, Jr. The former was probably his son (1727-1782), who moved to Natick, as did his unmarried sisters. The latter was a member of the Loyall Nine who watched over Liberty Tree from his nearby workshop.

The gravestone for Deacon John Eliot and his two wives still stands in the Granary Burying Ground.

“A very Grand Brick Building, Arch’d all Round”

On 4 Mar 1748 the Massachusetts General Court tackled the question of where to build a new meeting-place in Boston, now that it had considered and eliminated Cambridge and Roxbury.

A committee proposed

that they should go at four o’Clock this Afternoon, to view the Common and Fort-Hill, and determine which was the most convenient Place to build a new Court-House; as the said Committee were divided in their Sentiments upon that Affair. 

The lower house then voted not to approve that plan and discuss the whole matter “Wednesday next.” So the project wasn’t really off to a fast start.

Finally 9 March came around. After debate the house came to an important decision:

That the late Court-House in the Town of Boston be repair’d, as soon as conveniently may be, and that one Half the Charge thereof be borne by the Province, the other Half by the County of Suffolk and the Town of Boston.

The next day, a second vote clarified that the county and town should each pay a quarter of the cost. The house named a committee headed by speaker Thomas Hutchinson to buy building materials, prepare an architectural plan, and estimate the budget. The Council, which appears to have been holding out for this result, quickly agreed with both those votes.

Thus, after a month of decisions that the new Court-House should be built in Cambridge, Roxbury, and somewhere new in Boston, the legislature determined to simply rebuild their old home. And that’s why we still have the Old State House with its 1713 walls in downtown Boston.

By the end of the month, Hutchinson’s committee had completed a design for the rebuilt interior and a budget of £18,104—in that inflated “Old Tenor” currency. The actual cost was totaled in October 1750 as £3,705.11s.4d “Lawful Money.” By that time, the Massachusetts government had implemented Hutchinson’s plan for stabilizing its notes.

A merchant named Francis Goelet visited Boston in 1750 and described how good the Town House looked:

It’s a very Grand Brick Building, Arch’d all Round, and Two Storie Heigh, Sash’d above; its Lower Part is always Open, design’d as a Change, tho’ the Merchants in Fair Weather make their Change in the open Street at the Eastermost End. In the upper Story are the Council and Assembly Chambers &c. It has a neat Capulo, sash’d all round, and which on rejoycing days is Elluminated.

Thomas Hutchinson had succeeded in keeping the General Court in Boston, and in easing inflation. However, as fallout from his currency plan, in May 1750 the Boston town meeting chose not to reelect him to the house. (His legislative colleagues elevated him to the Council instead, where he served until 1766.)

One curiosity about the discussion of where to build the Court-House from December 1747 to March 1748 is that it appears to have never been reported in the newspapers. There were close votes in the house, disagreements between the two legislative chambers, and a revived opposition press in the Independent Advertiser—a situation that seems conducive to leaks. But I can’t see a mention of the controversy.

I don’t know the private sources from this period well, but I’ve found no other sign of public discussion about where to locate the building, either. The records of Boston’s selectmen and town meetings don’t mention the rebuilt Town House until it came time in 1751 to pay the bill.

A later curiosity is that when the Old State House was rededicated as a museum in 1882, the 180-page official city record of the program, full of speeches and transcriptions from historic documents down to Thomas Crafts’s repainting bill from 1773, doesn’t mention those months of indecision. The quoted legislative record just skips all the votes in February.

That brief period in 1748 appears to be one of the few times that the Massachusetts government considered making some town outside Boston into the permanent seat of government. As I discussed back here, it’s very unusual for a colonial capital to remain a state capital. And the gaps in the record make it feel almost as if Boston interests don’t want to let word out that people considered moving the government anywhere else.

“A youth, son to Captain John Gore”

The older boy wounded by Ebenezer Richardson’s shot on 22 Feb 1770 was nineteen-year-old Samuel Gore.

He appears here in his early-1750s portrait by John Singleton Copley, a detail from a painting now at Winterthur. Of course, this when Sammy was still a toddler and Copley was still developing his technique.

In contrast to Christopher Seider, a servant born to poor German immigrant parents, Sammy Gore came from an old New England Puritan family that was rising swiftly in society. The portrait of the kids was one sign of that social ambition, even if the young artist might have done it for practice or in barter for paints.

Sammy’s father John Gore had started as a decorative painter. Specializing in heraldic designs, he developed an upper-class clientele and began to move into that class himself—as a paint merchant, a militia officer, and eventually an Overseer of the Poor, one of the most respected town offices. By 1770 he was considered a gentleman.

Capt. John Gore’s oldest child, Frances, married Thomas Crafts, Jr., another decorative painter. (I suspect he was one of Gore’s early apprentices, but I can’t confirm that.) Crafts became an active member of the “Loyall Nine” who organized the first anti-Stamp Act protests and looked after Liberty Tree. He, too, was rising through militia service and town offices.

Capt. Gore’s first son, also named John, became a dry goods merchant. He married the niece of the Rev. Henry Caner, minister of King’s Chapel. Both John, Jr., and Samuel had tried schooling at the South Latin School, which would have prepared them for Harvard, but decided to drop out for more practical education. Their little brother Christopher (Kit), however, was sailing through the Latin School curriculum.

In August 1769, Capt. Gore, his son John, and his son-in-law Crafts all dined with the Sons of Liberty at Lemuel Robinson’s tavern in Dorchester, as described here. At the time John, Jr., advertised that he was sticking to the non-importation agreement in the cloth he sold from his shop.

Of course, it was hard for a paint merchant to take that stance and stay in business—the Townshend Act put a tariff on painter’s colors. Sammy, training under his father in decorative painting, had a close-up look at that situation. In late January 1770, the Boston Chronicle published Customs house documents revealing that Capt. Gore had paid duties on “4 barrels Painters colours” that had arrived on the Abigail and more goods that had later come on the Thomas.

That revelation might have motivated the family to demonstrate their commitment to non-importation. In the third week of February, the Gores—more probably, Frances Gore and her daughters and perhaps daughters-in-law—hosted a spinning bee at their house on Queen Street. This was a social occasion, but it also showed the women’s support for local manufacturing.

Most spinning bees took place in rural towns, usually in ministers’ houses, with the host accepting the gift of the spun yarn to benefit the poor. Of ten spinning bees that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich counted in and around Boston in 1766-70, the Gores’ was one of only two not in a minister’s home.

Early in its local news roundup, the 26 Feb 1770 Boston Gazette put a strong political spin on the Gores’ event:

One Day last Week a Number of Patriot Ladies met at the House of John Gore, Esq; of this Town, when their Industry at the Spinning Wheel was at least equal to any Instance recorded in our Paper.

It is principally owing to the indefatigable Pains of Mr. William Mollineux; and it will be said to his lasting Honor, that the laudable Practice of Spinning is almost universally in Vogue among the Female Children of this Town; whereby they are not only useful to the Community, but the poorer Sort are able in some Measure to assist their Parents in getting a Livelihood—

The Use of the Spinning-Wheel is now encouraged, and the pernicious Practice of Tea-drinking equally discountenanced, by all the Ladies of this Town, excepting those whose Husbands are Tories and Friends to the American Revenue-Acts; and a few Ladies who are Tories themselves.

By the time that item was published, Sammy Gore had made his own political statement about non-importation by showing up outside Ebenezer Richardson’s house on 22 February. We don’t know if he was among the boys who organized the demonstrations at Theophilus Lillie’s shop or if he threw garbage and rocks at Richardson’s house. But we do know Sammy Gore was close enough to the front of the crowd to be struck by pellets from Richardson’s gun.

The Boston Gazette stated, “A youth, son to Captain John Gore, was also wounded in one of his hands and in both his thighs.” The Boston Evening-Post reported:

Dr. [Joseph] Warren likewise cut two slugs out of young Mr. Gore’s thighs, but pronounced him in no danger of death, though in all probability he will lose the use of the right forefinger, by the wound received there, much important to a youth of his dexterity in drawing and painting.

As it turned out, Samuel Gore would enjoy a long and healthy career as a painter and manufacturer. In the 1830s a Boston barber recalled that he would show young people his scarred fingers and describe how he’d been wounded in the Revolution “with some relish.”

(For more about Samuel Gore’s Revolutionary activities and reminiscences, see The Road to Concord.)

TOMORROW: A grand funeral.

Amos Lincoln during and after the War

I’ve been discussing the story of nineteen-year-old Amos Lincoln at the Boston Tea Party.

That wasn’t the end of Lincoln’s participation in the American Revolution. He was at the prime age for military service when the war began, and the lore about him says that his master, carpenter Thomas Crafts, Sr., “released him from his obligation as an apprentice, in consequence of his ardent desire to enter the army of his country.”

According to the Annals of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, Lincoln “was in the battle of Bunker-Hill, attached to General [John] Stark’s regiment.” That raises questions since Stark commanded men from New Hampshire. With family in Hingham, Lincoln would most likely have gone to the southern side of the siege lines and served under Gen. John Thomas. It’s possible the young man simply “attached” himself to the most convenient unit, or it’s possible later storytellers did the attaching for him.

The M.C.M.A. Annals also stated that Lincoln “was in the actions at Bennington [16 Aug 1777], Brandywine [11 Sept 1777], and Monmouth [28 June 1778].” That claim makes no sense, and not just because that would put him in two different armies during the same season.

We know from Massachusetts records that Amos Lincoln served mostly close to home. He joined the state artillery regiment commanded by his master’s son, Thomas Crafts, Jr. On 10 May 1776, Col. Crafts submitted a list of officers to the state government, and Amos Lincoln was made a captain-lieutenant. He was promoted to captain in January 1778 and remained at that rank as command of the regiment passed to Lt. Col. Paul Revere in 1779.

Boston tour guide Ben Edwards displays a return of a company of matrosses (artillery privates) that Capt. Lincoln filed with the state on 1 Jan 1781, while he was helping to guard Boston harbor. In lore this became that he was “at one time in charge of the castle,” and that he “commanded the company at Fort Independence which fired the salute at the first celebration of Independence Day in Boston, July 4, 1777.”

In 1873, T. C. Amory told this story about one of Capt. Lincoln’s campaigns:

while reconnoitring on one occasion with Lafayette, the latter suggested the importance of an earthwork at an advantageous point near by, and requested him to have it forthwith constructed. The work was already approaching completion when Colonel [John] Crane,—his immediate superior, who was also of the tea-party, and indeed seriously injured in the affair by the fall of a chest upon him,—rode by, and expressed his surprise and displeasure, inquiring by whose order he had acted. Lincoln replied that it was in obedience simply to the colonel’s master and his own, and soon made his peace by giving the colonel’s name to the fort.

This may refer to the abortive campaign against the British in Rhode Island in late 1778. Crane and Lafayette were there. But I don’t see any mention in Massachusetts records of Capt. Lincoln being assigned to that campaign.

The early profiles of Lincoln state that after the war he participated in putting down the Shays Rebellion. He worked as a master carpenter in the building of the new Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill. He was also a member of the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons starting in 1777.

Amos Lincoln married Deborah Revere, daughter of his regimental commander, in January 1781. They had nine children, and Deborah died in January 1797. In May 1797, Amos married his sister-in-law Elizabeth Revere, and they had five more children, the first arriving at the end of December. Elizabeth died in April 1805, and in July Amos married the widow Martha Robb, and they had three more children.

Amos’s older brother Levi went into the law and was eventually U.S. Attorney General under Thomas Jefferson, lieutenant governor of Massachusetts under James Sullivan, and briefly acting governor. Levi’s sons Levi, Jr., and Enoch became governors of Massachusetts and Maine, respectively. One of Amos’s grandsons, Frederic W. Lincoln, was mayor of Boston for several years. Amos Lincoln’s obituary said he was “an undeviating disciple of Washington,” thus most likely a Federalist.

Amos Lincoln and His Prayerful Master

When Amos Lincoln died in 1829, the Columbian Centinel newspaper described him as “one of the intrepid band who consigned the Tea to the ocean, in 1773.” But it took another couple of decades before details of Lincoln’s story got into print.

The earliest version I’ve seen is in the Annals of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, compiled by printer Joseph T. Buckingham and published in 1853. It said:

AMOS LINCOLN was born in Hingham, March 18, 1754. At fourteen, he was apprenticed to a Mr. Crafts, of Boston, with whom he remained about six years. He was present at the destruction of the Tea in Boston harbor in 1773, (being then about nineteen years old,) and assisted in the execution of that intrepid act. It is related that his master, apprehending that he might be out on some perilous enterprize, prayed most earnestly that he might be protected and prospered, and was pleasantly disappointed the next morning when he returned in safety.

That’s not how I’d used the word “disappointed,” but I see what they’re getting at.

The Massachusetts Historical Society published a longer version of the tale in 1873 as it was observing the centenary of the Tea Party. Its Proceedings volume reported:

Mr. T. C. Amory expressed his wish to place on the honored roll two other names well known in our community, associated with the event which we this evening celebrate; namely, those of Amos Lincoln and James Swan. The former was born March 17, 1753, at Hingham. . . .

Lincoln…was apprenticed to Mr. Crafts, of Boston, who resided at the north part of the town, and still serving his time with him when the event occurred which is now commemorated. Mr. Crafts, possibly not wishing that his other apprentices should incur the consequences of so bold a proceeding, though not averse to Amos taking part in it, secretly procured an Indian disguise for him, and dressed him in his own chamber, darkening his face to the required tint.

As we find that “Thomas Crafts” joined, in 1762, St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons, which met at the Green Dragon Tavern, where, as well as at Edes & Gill’s printing-office, the arrangements for the night’s work were made, there is little doubt that he and Amos’s master was one and the same person.

(Actually, that was an error.)

Exemplary in his habits of devotion, he prayed long and fervently that the young man might be protected and prospered in his enterprise; and after some hours his anxieties were relieved by his safe return. That there was some solemn pledge among them not to reveal who were their associates, is evident from the reticence of all concerned; for, though Mr. Lincoln later acknowledged his own participation, he would not mention the particulars or betray the names of his companions.

Then came the profile of Amos Lincoln in Francis S. Drake’s Tea Leaves of 1884:

Born in Hingham, Mass., March 17, 1753, died at Quincy, Mass., January 15, 1829. He was apprenticed to a Mr. Crafts, at the North End, who, on the evening of December 16, 1773, secretly procured for him an Indian disguise, dressed him in his own chamber,—darkening his face to the required tint,—and then, dropping on his knees, prayed most fervently that he might be protected in the enterprise in which he was engaged. 

You’ll notice a discrepancy in these profiles about Lincoln’s birthdate. In fact, they’re all wrong. Hingham vital records state that Amos was born on 18 Mar 1753.

Finally, Edward G. Porter’s Rambles in Old Boston from 1886:

Captain Amos Lincoln…came from Hingham to Boston and engaged in house-building, being subsequently employed as carpenter for the new State House. Amos participated in the tea party of Dec. 16, 1773, obtaining his Mohawk disguise through the assistance of his master, Crafts, who, it is said, at family devotions prayed “for the young man out on a perilous errand” that night.

Who was Lincoln’s master? His name was Crafts, he lived “at the North End,” and he was a house carpenter. That must have been Thomas Crafts, Sr.

The Thomas Crafts who joined the St. Andrew’s Lodge was that carpenter’s son, Thomas Crafts, Jr. He was a japanner, or decorative painter, and he lived in the South End. He was deeply involved in Boston’s political resistance, from the first protests of the “Loyall Nine” in 1765 to the public reading of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Despite Thomas Crafts, Jr.’s prominence as a Patriot, he wasn’t listed as a participant in the Tea Party until his family published a family history in 1893. I suspect he might have become too well known to actually set foot on the tea ships.

The Crafts Family credited Amos Lincoln’s grandson, “Frederic W. Lincoln [1817-1898, shown above] (Mayor of Boston from 1857 to 1860 and from 1862 to 1866,)” with passing on the story of how the older Crafts had prepared him for the Tea Party and prayed for him. It’s possible that Frederic Lincoln was the source of all the published lore going back to 1853, or it’s possible that he collected at least some of that lore from printed sources and passed it on.

TOMORROW: Amos Lincoln’s crowd.

Capt. David Bradlee, Wine-Merchant

If there’s not enough evidence to say David Bradlee participated in the Boston Tea Party of 1773, I don’t know what he did between the collapse of George Gailer’s lawsuit in late 1771 and the start of the war.

When Bradlee resurfaces in my notes, however, he was still deep inside Boston’s Revolutionary resistance. In early 1776, he was quartermaster of the Continental artillery regiment. (He may have had this job earlier as well.)

Once the war moved south to New York, Bradlee declined to move with the regiment, recently assigned to young Col. Henry Knox. So did the second-in-command, Lt. Col. William Burbeck, and a significant number of the men.

Bradlee instead became an officer in Massachusetts’s artillery regiment under Col. Thomas Crafts, who had helped to organize Boston’s resistance since the first anti-Stamp Act protest in 1765; Crafts was bitterly disappointed not to receive a colonelcy from the Continental Congress. The second-ranking officer in that regiment was Lt. Col. Paul Revere. The regiment’s major was Thomas Melvill, a veteran of the Tea Party. The regimental surgeon was Dr. Joseph Gardner, who had helped Bradlee carry Crispus Attucks away from the Boston Massacre.

Again, Bradlee was right in the middle of the socially rising mechanics who drove the Revolution in Boston’s streets and public meetings. He now had a military rank, and people referred to him as “Captain Bradlee” for the rest of his life. He joined the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons in 1777.

Bradlee’s connections helped him start building his fortune. On 10 Apr 1778 he joined Melvill and John Hinkley as majority investors in the privateer Speedwell. The ship left Boston harbor in July. After only three days, it captured a British sloop “laden with Sugar, Coffee, Cocoa, Limes, etc.” David Bradlee’s ship had come in.

In Boston’s 1780 tax roll, Bradlee was listed as a tavern-keeper, no longer a tailor. That same year, his younger sister Elizabeth Bradlee (1757-1832) married Gershom Spear (1755-1816), a nephew of Pool Spear, thus uniting the families of two of the people that Gailer had sued ten years earlier.

By the mid-1780s, David Bradlee was recognized as a “wine-merchant,” importing a commodity of upper-class life. He started to rent the basement of the State House to store his inventory, a sign of his continuing connections with the local government. The rent was £17, and the selectmen didn’t collect for two years until he’d finished renovating the space.

In 1794, after nine years, the State House rent was raised to £45, and Bradlee moved out. He bought a large wood and brick shop on the “w[est] side of the…Corn Market,” erected a set of scales outside the front door, and continued selling wine.

Bradlee had carried his family into genteel society. His daughter Sarah married a U.S. Navy captain, Patrick Fletcher. His son Samuel married Catherine Crafts, a daughter of Col. Crafts. His son David W. Bradlee became a member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company and of the Boston Board of Health.

Capt. David Bradlee died on March 6, 1811—“very sudden,” according to one citizen’s diary. He was mourned as a respected member of Boston’s business community and laid to rest in the family’s own tomb, purchased in 1800.

The American Revolution allowed this tailor to become an officer and a merchant. Still, Capt. Bradlee may never have escaped hearing words like those the Rev. Jeremy Belknap attributed to a blacksmith chafing at the demands of a newly-rich tailor: “Come, come, citizen pricklouse, do not give yourself such airs as this! It was but t’other day that you was glad to measure my arse for a pair of breeches.”

Introducing Capt. Samuel Dashwood

The merchant captain Samuel Dashwood is one of the more dramatic characters in Revolutionary Boston, with a name out of an eighteenth-century novel to match his behavior. I’m a little surprised I’ve never mentioned him before, but I’m bringing him onto the stage now.

Dashwood was born in 1729 or so. In 1785 he told a British government commission that “He was formerly before the Mast with Sir Peter Warren”—i.e., he served as a seaman in the Royal Navy under the naval commander at the 1745 Louisbourg siege (shown here). Dashwood didn’t mention serving in that particular campaign, however.

Dashwood settled in Boston, marrying Ann Rustin (or possibly Rushton) in December 1756. But at first “settled” simply meant using Boston as his home base while he continued to sail across the Atlantic on trading voyages.

We can glimpse Dashwood’s comings and goings in the newspapers’ shipping news: arriving from London in Newbury harbor in January 1759, sailing for Britain in convoy with other captains that November, arriving in Boston in October 1764, and so on.

In addition, on 8 June 1767, the decorative painter and political activist Thomas Crafts advertised in the Boston Gazette:

JUST imported from LONDON, in Captain Dashwood, and to be Sold by
Thomas Crafts, jun’r.
At his Shop at Raphael’s Head, opposite the Hon. Samuel Welles, Esq; Near LIBERTY-TREE, Painters Oyls and Colours, &c—&c— by Wholesale or Retail, cheap for Cash. Carpet and all Sorts of Painting.

In those same years the captain and his wife Ann, whom everyone knew as Nancy, started a family. They bought a house from her relatives in 1760. Their son Samuel, Jr., was born on 29 Sept 1761 but not immediately baptized. Perhaps Dashwood was at sea at the time. He joined the New South Meetinghouse in December, and little Samuel was baptized there on 3 January.

More children followed, steadily at first and then with increasing rapidity:

• Rushton, baptized 18 Mar 1764
• John, baptized 5 Oct 1766
• William, baptized 28 Feb 1768 and dying young
• William, baptized 24 Dec 1769
• Nancy, baptized 9 June 1771
• Pigge (presumably called Peggy), baptized 17 May 1772
• Hannah, baptized 26 Sept 1773

The Dashwood household also included enslaved people. One was a girl or young woman named Jenney, named in the will of the free black man John Fortune who died on 13 Nov 1764. In July 1767, Dashwood offered for sale “A likely Negro Boy of about 13 Years of Age, sold for no Fault, only for want of Employment.”

Dashwood doesn’t appear in Boston’s merchant-dominated politics in the early and mid-1760s. He may have been away too often, or he may have felt no beef with the royal government. In December 1768 he sailed into Boston harbor carrying a letter from “a Gentleman in London,” later printed in several newspapers, counseling Bostonians to drop their opposition to the Townshend Act.

In the harbor, Dashwood met the Royal Navy ship Senegal, then commanded by the baronet Sir Thomas Rich. Under a previous captain, some Senegal officers had been involved in a killing in Rhode Island, as described in this fine article. The ship was then part of the fleet that carried troops from Halifax to Boston in September 1768.

Sir Thomas was leaving Boston when Dashwood’s ship came in, and he wanted a full crew. The merchant John Rowe recorded in his diary on 5 December what happened next:

Be it remembered that Sir Thos. Rich of the Senegall pressed all Capt. Dashwood’s hands.

By impressing an inbound crew, Rich didn’t stop Dashwood’s ship from completing its trip, which would have infuriated all the Boston merchants involved. Even Gov. Francis Bernard had protested that behavior. But the impressment did force Dashwood to recruit a new crew for his next trip. And, having served “before the Mast” himself, he might have felt pity for his sailors, not allowed to land in Boston and forced to serve in the navy.

Whether or not this particular incident radicalized him, over the next couple of years Samuel Dashwood became one of the most active, militant, and forceful members of the Boston Whigs.