“Fashioning the New England Family” in Boston

The “Fashioning the New England Family” exhibit will be on display at the Massachusetts Historical Society through 6 April. It’s well worth a visit, especially because it’s free.

The webpage on the exhibit explains:

Fashioning the New England Family explores the ways in which the multiple meanings of fashion and fashionable goods are reflected in patterns of consumption and refashioning, recycling, and retaining favorite family pieces. Many of the items that will be featured have been out of sight, having never been exhibited for the public or seen in living memory. . . .

For the public, it is an opportunity to view in detail painstaking craftsmanship, discover how examples of material culture relate to significant moments in our history, and learn how garments were used as political statements, projecting an individual’s religion, loyalties, and social status.

The garments on display range from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The ways they’re displayed are often as interesting as the clothing itself. In a couple of cases, beside the garment is a portrait of its owner wearing it. One quilted petticoat is a recreation by Colonial Williamsburg tailors based on a pattern copied from the original—which was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. Tools show how clothing was made and repaired. Examples highlight how garments were remade or their fabrics reused.

The exhibit also features fashionable accessories, such as jewelry, shoes, and Abigail Adams’s pocket. One case is devoted to a rare example of a wig, wig case, powder, and related utensils. I was particularly struck by a walking stick that belonged to Thomas Hancock, shown here; I hadn’t known “fist canes” were a thing.

Given the expense of fashionable, high-quality clothing; the resources necessary to preserve those goods; and the Massachusetts Historical Society’s traditional supporters, upper-class fashion dominates the exhibit. But of course I looked for traces of “my guys,” the striving mechanics on the front line of pre-Revolutionary protests and military preparations, as discussed in The Road to Concord. Many of those men made it into the genteel class, but they struggled to get in and to solidify that status. Understanding fashion helped.

One item from “my guys” is shown at top: a hatchment that a young woman in the Pierpont family embroidered following the design of heraldic painters John and Samuel Gore. And there’s a whole display case devoted to objects from the family of William Dawes. He was a fashion icon in colonial Boston—the first time Dawes’s name appeared in the newspapers, it was because he got married in a suit of Massachusetts-woven cloth. That suit doesn’t survive, but the display includes homespun cloth from the Dawes family earlier in the century, a silk muff, bags and purses, and a kidskin bag that Dawes used to hold legal papers when he died in 1799.

For folks who can’t visit the exhibit before April, there’s also a Fashioning the New England Family book by guest curator Kimberly S. Alexander.

A Door into the Past

This week I got a look at the Bostonian Society’s new exhibit “Through the Keyhole” and its attendant short play, “Cato and Dolly.”

The starting-point for both exhibit and play is the door of the Hancock mansion on Beacon Hill, preserved when that 1737 building was destroyed in 1863. (The land that the mansion sat on is now occupied by a wing of the Massachusetts State House, but its initial replacement consisted of luxury townhouses in the newer taste.)

The Bostonian Society has exhibited the Hancock door in its Old State House Museum off and on over the years, but for the last couple of decades it was in storage. The society partnered with the preservation carpentry department at the North Bennet Street School to conserve the original door and create a setting for it.

(When I first heard about this project online, I got the impression that the school’s students were building a replica of the original door. In fact, they were recreating the original doorway based on measured drawings from 1863. That structure serves as a frame and support for the actual door.)

While that work was going on, the society also went to playwright Patrick Gabridge and director Courtney O’Connor, who had created the play Blood on the Snow for the Council Chamber of the Old State House two years ago. Their challenge: produce an interesting drama inspired by the door, incorporating the door—but no one could touch the door! It is, after all, a museum artifact.

Blood on the Snow immerses the audience in the events that took place inside the Old State House on the day after the Boston Massacre. It takes place in a somewhat sped-up real time without many obvious theatrical artifices.

In contrast, the actors in “Cato and Dolly” address viewers directly, take on different roles by donning and doffing hats, and portray moments in the title characters’ lives over half a century from the 1760s to the 1810s. The North Bennet Street School’s frame includes lots of bare wood, a carpenters’ choice that also reminds us of the constructed quality of this drama.

The play’s main characters are Cato Hancock, who began working for Thomas Hancock as an enslaved child, served his widow Lydia and nephew John, and finally returned to the house as a free middle-aged man; and Dorothy (Quincy) Hancock (Scott), fiancée, wife, and widow of Gov. Hancock. The cast I saw was Stephen Sampson as Cato (as well as Lafayette, James Scott, and others) and Becca A. Lewis as Dolly (as well as John and others), but three other people are playing those roles at other performances.

The result is a sort of smaller, earlier, and Bostonian version of Driving Miss Daisy, exploring America’s historical color line through the lives of an employer and an (at times coerced) employee. While the play discusses such major events as the fight at Lexington and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, it’s most affecting when the drama focuses on the two people in front of us.

Thus, I don’t recall the play ever mentioning the Massachusetts court decisions that made slavery unenforceable in the state, a moment in Hancock’s first stint as governor. But it delves into the difficulties of Cato’s status—Thomas and Lydia Hancock each freed Cato in their wills, but only conditionally, and the opportunities for a black man remained constricted in the early republic.

Likewise, the “Through the Keyhole” exhibit highlights the theme of how past lives are recorded and recalled, particularly those of people without the access to wealth and power like John Hancock. Paradoxically, it does this through artifacts preserved because they’re associated with John Hancock.

Since the Bostonian Society became the city’s attic during the Colonial Revival, it owns a miscellany of objects and papers once in the mansion on Beacon Hill. Items on display in “Through the Keyhole” include Thomas Hancock’s indenture to a bookseller, the family Bible, and a copper teapot. And, of course, the front door.

“Through the Keyhole” is part of the Old State House’s exhibits through September at least. Performances of “Cato and Dolly” take place every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday at 11:00 A.M. and 12:30 and 2:00 P.M., thus offering a chance to sit out the height of the summer sun. Each performance runs about half an hour, and the show is suitable for all ages (though attendees should be prepared for sad moments). A seat at the show is included in museum admission.

Mein Words about John Hancock

Loyalist John Mein wrote one of his “Sagittarius” essays in response to John Hancock’s 1774 oration on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre.

As I related yesterday, Hancock had seized Mein’s property in Boston on behalf of London creditors. In return, Mein took the opportunity to share nasty gossip about Boston’s leading merchant and his visit to London as a young man in 1760:

This great and honourable Master Hancock is very well known in London to many; indeed, unfortunately for them, too well known; for they would now esteem themselves happy, if they had never heard of him before this frantic Oration.

When he was in London about twelve years ago, he was the laughing-stock and the contempt of all his acquaintances: instead of attending and pushing his mercantile interest, visiting the different curiosities in and about Town, and forming reputable connections, as a young man of his great fortune ought to have done, he kept sneaking and lurking about the kitchen of his uncle’s correspondent, drank tea every day with the house-maid, and on Sundays escorted her to White Conduit House.

People unacquainted with Mr. Hancock’s natural condition thought, that his close attendance and attention arose from an amorous connection; but his old school-fellows and intimates knew, that though nature had bestowed upon him a human figure, she had denied him the powers of manhood. The girl was therefore in perfect safety, though unconscious of it. The sense of his incapacity could not however hinder him from thinking; perhaps the Fair Sex took possession of his head, and no doubt he loved them as well as he was able.

When he arrived in America, his uncle [Thomas Hancock], who knew his weakness and want of capacity, kept him at a distance form [sic] company; but as soon as he died, Flatterers, Rogues, and Knaves of all ages and all professions, flocked about him, as Vultures, Cormorants, and Carrion Crows flock about a dead Carcase. It is a melancholy consideration, that good natured folly shou’d be plundered and stript by such a nest of Villains as he associates with. His fortune has long been in the wane.

I suppose I should note that Hancock and his wife had two children.

Hancock was in London when George II died, and he hoped to stay to see the coronation of the new king. We know that from a letter he sent home.

In 1852 James Spear Loring wrote that Hancock actually did see that ceremony. Later authors added that the new monarch received the young merchant at court and presented him with a snuffbox bearing the royal portrait. But Hancock wasn’t yet prominent enough for such treatment. If he did bring such a snuffbox back from London, he’d bought it as a souvenir.

Furthermore, George III’s coronation was delayed for several months because of his royal wedding, and Hancock had to sail before then. Yet another disappointment.

TOMORROW: “Sagittarius” on Samuel Adams.

Smuggling in Boston, Before the Revolution and 18 Sept.

One of the sources John Tyler used for Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (1986) are the records of Ezekiel Price’s marine insurance office. Merchants were happy to lie to the Customs office about where their ships were headed, but they didn’t want to invalidate their insurance policies with misinformation. Many of the voyages that Price underwrote were therefore clearly going outside imperial bounds.

Tyler also reported that written evidence survives for smuggling by Thomas Hancock, the governor’s rich uncle; Shrimpton Hutchinson, the other governor’s cousin; Whig organizer William Molineux; fence-sitting merchant John Rowe; ropemaker Benjamin Austin; future tea consignee Richard Clarke; and Massacre victim Edward Payne, among others.

In 1766 the Boston Customs office tried to search the storehouse of Daniel Malcom, an incident that still shows up in histories of American search-and-seizure laws. There’s strong evidence that Malcom really was a smuggler, even aside from how he refused to let the Customs men onto his property.

The most prominent merchant accused of smuggling before the Revolutionary War was, of course, John Hancock. The fortune he inherited from his uncle was certainly based in part on illegal trade (as well as government contracts). But the case that John Hancock himself oversaw serious smuggling is still unproven.

Peter Andreas’s Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America is the latest book to ply this region.  It covers the period from colonial times to the present, with smuggling dominated in different eras by molasses, slaves, drugs, booze, and people.

Andreas, a professor in the Department of Political Science at Brown University, will speak at the Massachusetts Historical Society on Wednesday, 18 September. There will be a reception at 5:30, and Andreas is due to speak at 6:00. This event costs $10 for people who aren’t M.H.S. members, and reservations are required. But if his book’s theme holds true, you can probably find someone to sneak you in.

Grizzell Apthorp: Widow, Employer, Property Owner

This is an image of Robert Feke’s portrait of Grizzell Apthorp (1709-1796), made in the late 1740s. The original now belongs to the De Young Museum in San Francisco.

The sitter was born Grizzell Eastwick in Jamaica. Her maternal grandfather was Sir John Lloyd, a baronet. Grizzell’s family moved to Boston in 1716, and ten years later she married Charles Apthorp (1698-1758) at King’s Chapel. They were part of a class of wealthy Anglicans who had a lot of money from Caribbean sugar plantations and slave labor.

Charles Apthorp earned even more money as a merchant and supplier of specie to the British army during the imperial wars of the mid-1700s. As a measure of how rich he became, his junior partner was Thomas Hancock, the rich uncle who left his fortune to John Hancock. In other words, the Apthorps had even more money than the Hancocks. In 1758 the New-Hampshire Gazette called Charles Apthorp “the greatest merchant on this continent.”

Having married in her teens, Grizzell Apthorp had the good health to bear eighteen children, over a dozen surviving to adulthood. Grizzell’s namesake daughter married Barlow Trecothick, who became a London alderman and briefly lord mayor. Her daughter Susan married Dr. Thomas Bulfinch, father of the architect, and her daughter Ann married Nathaniel Wheelwright, a linchpin of Boston finance until 1765.

Charles died in 1758, and his eldest son Charles Ward Apthorp took over most of his business, moving to New York when the army command located there. Another son, Thomas, succeeded his father as paymaster to the British troops. Other sons remained in Boston. East Apthorp was the first minister of Christ Church in Cambridge, but the provincial reaction to him was so hostile that he moved to England; the mansion he commissioned, still called Apthorp House, is now part of Harvard.

After her husband’s death Grizzell was usually called “Madam Apthorp,” the title of respect for a rich widow as opposed to an ordinary one. She was a devout supporter of King’s Chapel. A 1771 letter to Robert Treat Paine shows she was also active in looking after her real estate outside town.

Grizzell Apthorp became connected to the political violence of early 1770 in at least two ways:

• Young Christopher Seider was “living” at her house when he died on 22 February, meaning that he was working there at least part-time as a domestic servant.
• She owned the house on King Street that the Customs service rented as an office. The Boston Massacre occurred outside that building on 5 March.

In addition, in 1821 octogenarian Mary Turell recalled that some of the British army officers of the time boarded in another house Madam Apthorp owned.

Though most of her family were Loyalists, Grizzell Apthorp never left Massachusetts and thus never lost her property during the war. She remained in Boston and in the King’s Chapel congregation through the changes of the 1780s, still “Madam Apthorp” to her neighbors. A death notice declared: “So unexceptionable was her deportment in every relation of life, though she remained near a century upon its theatre, and passed through successive empires of beauty and fortune, envy never dared to utter a lisp, or slander to forge a dart against her fame.”