“He declin’d taking a Seat at the honorable Board”

Yesterday I described how in May 1772 Gov. Thomas Hutchinson reversed the pattern of previous years and accepted John Hancock’s election to the Council, the upper house of the Massachusetts General Court.

The governor hoped that would help to pull Hancock away from the influence of Samuel Adams, a fellow member and clerk of the lower house.

On 28 May provincial secretary Thomas Flucker delivered Gov. Hutchinson’s approval of the list of Council members and a message

desiring that the House would send up John Hancock and Samuel Phillips, Esq’rs; Members of this House, and chosen Yesterday to the Members of his Majesty’s Council, that they may take their Seats at the Board.

Hancock’s response appears in the record of the Massachusetts House:

John Hancock, Esq; acquainted the House that he declin’d taking a Seat at the honorable Board to which he was elected, and gave his Reasons in the House.

Unfortunately, the record doesn’t preserve those reasons, and I haven’t seen any source that states them. Quite possibly Hancock never wanted to be on the Council—he just wanted to be asked.

Hutchinson was still optimistic about converting Hancock to the side of the Crown, or at least convincing him not to fund the Whigs, with such signs of favor. In response to what he perceived as cooperation, the governor brought the General Court back to Boston’s Town House later in 1772.

Gov. Hutchinson’s reports about wooing Hancock reached London. In early 1773 John Wilkes reportedly said he’d heard that “Mr. H. had deserted the Cause of Liberty.” As quoted back here, Adams sent corrective letters to Arthur Lee, declaring such reports were “a scurvy Trick of lying.” As Adams framed it, Colonial Secretary Lord Hillsborough had told Hutchinson to “to promote Mr. H. …But he had Spirit enough to refuse a Seat at the Board, & continue a Member of the House.” (In fact, that strategy was always Hutchinson’s idea.)

I doubt Hancock ever turned against Samuel Adams in the pre-war period. I think he just sensed that with most of the Townshend duties repealed, no troops patrolling the streets, and no new measures from Parliament, Bostonians were ready for a less confrontational political approach. Hancock followed the public mood while Adams continued to push.

Hancock’s real allegiance was to the voters and his reelection prospects. He continued to spend his money in ways that conspicuously benefited Boston: cloth for Dr. Joseph Warren’s suit at that year’s Massacre memorial oration, cloth to drape on the pulpit, a new fire engine. He continued to serve as both a selectman and a representative. And now he was “Colonel Hancock.”

On imperial politics, Hancock continued to side with the Whigs. Though in the next year and a half he wouldn’t take part in Adams’s most radical measures, such as joining the new standing committee of correspondence, he also didn’t block those.

Then came the tea crisis. Both the public mood and Hancock shifted. The merchant joined Boston’s radical leaders at the front of the crowd in the protest meetings in Old South. He delivered the Massacre oration himself in 1774. That fall, he chaired the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. In 1775 he joined the Continental Congress and soon became its president—rising higher in politics than Adams.

TOMORROW: Tensions in the Congress.

(Photo above by Axel R-D, courtesy of Flickr.))

“I had settled it some months ago to accept Hancock”

John Hancock was elected to three important positions in the spring of 1772.

In April, fellow members of the Company of Cadets unanimously chose Hancock to lead that upper-class militia company, which served as the governor’s honor guard.

Though the top officer in ordinary companies was a captain, the Cadets commander had the rank of colonel. Because they were fancy, and rich, and well connected.

Knowing Hancock would like that status, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson approved the company’s choice. 

In May 1772, Boston held a town meeting to choose the town’s four representatives in the lower house of the Massachusetts General Court.

Back in May 1771, the four men elected had been:

• Thomas Cushing, 410 votes
• John Hancock, 410
• Samuel Adams, 403
• James Otis, 399

(Adams was listed in the town records as “Mr. Samuel Adams” while the other three men were given the honorifics “Honorable” and “Esquire.” All four had been elected to the house before, so those designations must have been based on perceived wealth, not formal rank in government.)

In May 1772, many more voters came to Faneuil Hall for the representatives’ election. This time the results were:

• Cushing, 699 votes
• Hancock, 690
• William Phillips, 668
• Adams, 505

Town clerk William Cooper didn’t list any other candidates, but there probably were some.

Adams won reelection with support from about 70% of the voters, but that was still a marked tumble from previous years. The March meeting highlighting his deficits as a tax collector might have hurt him. It’s also seems likely that the electorate had cooled on Adams’s militancy given that the Crown hadn’t forced any new measures for many months.

Those four representatives went out to Cambridge for the General Court session starting on 27 May. On the first day, Cushing was reelected as speaker of the assembly, Adams as its clerk. Then came the choice of the Council for the new legislative year.

The legislators produced a list of twenty-six men, including Hancock. That choice wasn’t a surprise. He had been named every year since 1768. And every year the royal governors exercised their prerogative to veto his selection.

This spring, however, Gov. Hutchinson had a new idea. He accepted all the proposed Councilors except Jerathmeel Bowers of Swansea. (Privately, Hutchinson wrote that the legislators had nearly chosen Phillips and Adams for the Council, and he would have vetoed them, too.)

As the governor told his predecessor, Sir Francis Bernard, in a letter the next day:

I had settled it some months ago to accept Hancock & have seen the good effects of it not that I can depend upon his being for any time of the same mind but it breaks the connexion & they are all jealous of him and in the greatest part of their measures he forsakes them. . . .

Han. carries Ad. in his chariot but when they come to Court they seldom vote the same way. If the former exerts himself as he promised me will do I think it not improbable that before the end of the year if not before the end of the Session they will apply to me in such a manner as that I may bring [the General Court] to Boston consistent with my Instruction. I wish to do it chiefly that I may have the Members every day at my table and provide an Antidote for the poison of that white liverd fellow that you usd so much to detest.

Convinced that Hancock wished to distance himself from Adams, and felt grateful about his colonelcy and rising onto the Council, Hutchinson was optimistic he could break up the political partnership that had roiled Boston for years.

TOMORROW: Hancock’s choice.

“Remaining unpaid of Mr. Adams Debt to the Town”

A couple of days ago I recounted how in March 1771 the Boston town meeting appointed the merchant William Whitwell and four other men to look into the town’s finances.

That committee finally reported on its inquiry on 9 Mar 1772. Among its conclusions was:

We also find that there still remains to be paid into the Province Treasury on Account of Mr. Samuel Adams the Sum of Fifty Pounds and from the information given us by Mr. Robert Peirpoint it appears that there is no probability of any part of the Sum of £1149 10 0 1/4 remaining unpaid of Mr. Adams Debt to the Town, will ever be received and paid into the Treasury——

Adams had been one of Boston’s tax collectors from 1756 to 1765. He turned over a lot less money than he was supposed to collect. No one believed Adams had kept funds for himself, however. Rather, he hadn’t pressed citizens for everything they legally owed. If the townspeople pressured him for more money, they knew he’d have little choice but to squeeze them back, and no one wanted that.

According to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, John Hancock had spurred that inquiry while knowing it could harm Adams. The finding that Adams owed more than £1,000 might indeed have been embarrassing except that the town meeting had already voted to sue him for uncollected taxes back in 1767. Hutchinson had presided over an appeal of that suit. Boston had granted Pierpont, one of Adams’s bondsmen, authority to collect back taxes on his behalf. In sum, the outstanding sum was old news.

Whitwell and his committee also found that a couple of more recent tax collectors owed £148 and £432, minus their premiums. The town was in legal negotiations with another former tax collector, Jonathan Payson. Such disputes weren’t uncommon, though Adams’s deficit was much bigger than others.

In addition, the committee found that Thomas Cushing owed £155 and John Ruddock £82 from selling lottery tickets for the town. Both those men were politically active Whigs. Hutchinson suspected Cushing had been another of Hancock’s targets.

Yet later in the same afternoon, the meeting considered the even older debt of “the Linnen Manufacturing Company” that had built the Manufactory building beside the Common. Three “Surviving Members” of that company—Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver, commissary general Thomas Hubbard, and Dr. Silvester Gardiner—asked the town to write off the remaining amount. The meeting refused. Those gentlemen were on Hutchinson’s side in the political disputes.

One more financial question remained: William Molineux petitioned the town for more money for his spinning enterprise, which provided employment for poor women and children. Or at least to forgive the £300 it had loaned him years before. Molineux was among the Boston Whigs’ most radical leaders.

That question was so involved that the discussion was adjourned to the next day. A “printed Paper” criticizing Molineux was spread around by persons unknown. “After considerable debate,” the meeting heard justice Richard Dana’s judgment that the law wouldn’t let the town forgive Molineux’s debt. So the men at the meeting voted to take no action at all beyond rejecting “unjust Reflections on Mr. Mollineuxs Character” and thanking the man for “his faithful discharge of a Contract.”

Meanwhile, Massachusetts’s royal judges took advantage of how Molineux and his supporters were busy in Faneuil Hall on that 10 March to deliver a royal pardon to convicted murderer Ebenezer Richardson so he could slip out of town unnoticed.

All in all, I see the 1772 inquiry into debts owed the town as fairly ordinary business. I’m sure Hutchinson was pleased that people had to pay attention to Samuel Adams’s “defalcation.” But I doubt the governor was accurate in believing Hancock was secretly, deliberately poking at Adams’s sensitive spot.

TOMORROW: Mr. Adams’s debt.

“An inquiry into the state of the finances of the town”

Even as he served as royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson was writing the third volume of his history of the colony.

Before he died in 1780, Hutchinson cut down that manuscript. Interestingly, he removed some passages defending his own conduct, though of course what survived presented his view of events.

Hutchinson’s grandson published the edited text in 1828. In 1936 the Harvard College administrator Lawrence Shaw Mayo (shown here) republished all three volumes in a scholarly edition.

In 1947, Mayo married Catherine Barton, a “friend and companion of long standing who shared his scholarly interests,” according to Clifford K. Shipton. Six weeks later, Mayo took his own life, to his friends’ shock.

Meanwhile, Shipton was tracking down a collector who had bought Hutchinson’s earlier manuscript. He asked Catherine Barton Mayo to study it, and she published the excised passages in the American Antiquarian Society Proceedings in 1949.

One of those passages stated about the spring of 1772:

The breach between [Samuel] Adams & [John] Hancock was apparently about this time greater than ever. The latter in a town meeting, a few weeks before, had intimated his design to move for an inquiry into the state of the finances of the town, in which the former had occasioned a great deficiency, and also into the state of monies raised by lottery for the benefit of the town of which lottery Mr. [Thomas] Cushing, the speaker of the House and a kinsman and fast friend of Mr. Adams, was one of the Trustees, and reported to be deficient.

As a town selectman, Hancock had a solid reason to push for an audit of Boston’s finances. The governor hinted that this concern was actually a clever way to distance himself from Adams and Cushing.

I’m not convinced Hutchinson’s presentation of events was accurate. To start with, although Adams and Cushing were personally close, Cushing’s politics were closer to Hancock’s, especially as the 1770s went on. On the question of how much to protest the Massachusetts General Court being convened outside of Boston, the issue that reportedly first divided Adams and Hancock in the spring of 1772, Cushing was on Hancock’s side.

Then there’s a matter of timing. Boston’s town records show that the meeting created its committee to look into financial matters on 27 May 1771. (Those records don’t say who proposed that measure.) The committee chairman was the merchant William Whitwell, and the other members were Thomas Dawes, Melatiah Bourn, Alexander Hill, and Ezekiel Price, political and business insiders.

That committee offered an interim report in June but didn’t deliver its full findings until 9 Mar 1772. Even that was, as Hutchinson’s own account says, “a few weeks before” the disagreement in the General Court led to Hancock’s first noted resentment of Adams.

Now according to Hutchinson’s unnamed sources, all the way back in June 1771 Hancock “wished to be seperated from Mr Adams.” And in December Adams sensed it necessary to assure Hancock that he hadn’t said certain things about him in a conversation about James Otis. So it’s possible that Hancock was chafing under Adams’s influence, set up the financial inquiry in May 1771, and finally openly objected to something Adams said the following April.

If so, Hancock was playing a really long game.

TOMORROW: Following the money, counting the votes.

“It was one cause of the alienation between them”

Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wasn’t the only chronicler to say Samuel Adams and John Hancock fell out over the question of how adamantly to protest against Hutchinson convening the Massachusetts General Court in Cambridge.

In 1809, the Rev. John Eliot (1754–1813, shown here) published A Biographical Dictionary, Containing a Brief Account of the First Settlers, and Other Eminent Characters among the Magistrates, Ministers, Literary and Worthy Men, in New-England.

Eliot was a son and successor of the Rev. Andrew Eliot (1718–1778), minister at the New North Meeting-House during the Revolution. He had thus met all the leading politicians of pre-Revolutionary Boston before coming of age and had heard plenty of gossip about them.

In his book’s short biography of Samuel Adams, Eliot wrote:

During these [legislative] sessions at Cambridge, a difference of opinion arose, upon some secondary matters, between Adams and Hancock, which cooled their friendship, and was succeeded by an antipathy, that had an effect upon the minds of the people, many of whom took a warm interest in this personal animosity, though they agreed in political sentiments; and acted together in the great affairs which arrested the attention of all the whigs.

Eliot went into more detail in his profile of Hancock:

There was a collision of sentiment among the leading whigs about the removal of the court to Boston. Hutchinson offered this upon certain conditions, which the majority of members saw fit to comply with.

Adams was against the measure, and expressed his sentiments in opposition to his friend and colleague. Mr. Hancock was a man impatient of contradiction, and, upon some occasions, indulged a petulant humour. He could not bear the opposition of Mr. Adams on this question. It was one cause of the alienation between them.

That gentleman [Adams] was cool and determined, hard and unyielding, as well as bold in his argument. He sometimes was sarcastick in his replies; but upon the subject which then divided the house, he observed the utmost delicacy, and seemed to dread the consequence of this political difference.

These gentlemen had different views, though equally zealous in their opposition to the mother country. Or else one looked further than the other. . . . The division of these two leading characters made parties among the whigs, especially in the town of Boston.

The relationship of Hancock and Adams was still sensitive years after both men had died, Eliot told the Rev. William Bentley in 1810, in a letter published in the New England Historic and Genealogical Register.

Eliot listed his entries about Adams, Hancock, and Hutchinson among his “best drawn.” However, “Several Gentlemen in Boston, estimable for Talents & worth, tho’ federalists (which may lower them with you), say they would not have subscribed for the book had they seen what I have said of S.A. & John Hancock.”

Eliot was looking back through years in which Hancock and Adams were much further apart than they were in 1772, so that could have magnified the importance of this moment. Nonetheless, he offers more testimony that Hancock’s response to Adams’s disagreement was the first crack in their partnership.

COMING UP: Town finances.

“The Right of the Governor to carry them to Houssatonick”

John Hancock and Samuel Adams split in early 1772 over a few small issues—at least according to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson.

The first involved where the Massachusetts General Court was meeting.

Under orders from London, Hutchinson had summoned the legislature to meet in Cambridge instead of in Boston. His predecessor, Gov. Francis Bernard, had done the same. The General Court had also gone to Cambridge during a smallpox outbreak.

In the eighteenth-century British Empire it was widely accepted that colonial legislatures would be elected once a year, but then the royal governors could convene those legislatures where and when they chose. This power derived from their being representatives of the monarch in Britain.

According to Hutchinson in June 1771:

Mr [James] Otis in a Speech the first day after the Election gave his opinion to the house that we had a very good Governour and he was sure the People in all parts of the Province thought so, he condemned the proceedings of the House the last year & acknowledged the Right of the Governor to carry them to Houssatonick, the Western extreme part of the Province, was sensible that it would be inconvenient and that he would not do it and hoped he would carry them back to Boston. This gave a shock to the party and the House voted to go on with their business as usual without a division or opposition.

This speech immediately made Otis’s colleagues and constituents worry about which side he was on.

Soon Adams as assembly clerk rallied the legislators to complain bitterly about being summoned to an inconvenient meeting place and refuse to do any business until they were back in Boston. Hutchinson tried to bring up issues that the representatives, especially those from western towns, couldn’t resist acting on.

As the spring of 1772 came around, Hutchinson let it be known that as long as the house petitioned him to convene the General Court in Boston for practical reasons, with no challenge to his chartered power to summon them elsewhere, he would accede to that preference. (After all, as house speaker decades earlier, he had maneuvered to keep the legislative seat in Boston.) 

Adams wanted to stick to the principled, no-compromise confrontation. Hancock, along with speaker Thomas Cushing, was willing to couch their complaint on practical grounds. Ultimately, so did the majority of legislators.

The difference between Adams’s and Hancock’s positions was not that big, and Hancock may have had a better sense of what his fellow lawmakers and voters were up for. Still, this disagreement over wording or tactics was enough to give Hutchinson hope that two of his biggest opponents were splitting.

One of the grievances in the Declaration of Independence would be:

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

That referred to this dispute over where the General Court should gather, which became an even bigger deal in 1774 when Gen. Thomas Gage summoned the legislature to Salem.

The Revolutionary War ended up changing the norm about where and when American legislatures met. The U.S. Constitution gave Congress authority over “the Seat of the Government of the United States” and provided for regular meetings there. Only “on extraordinary Occasions” can the President convene Congress, and only “in Case of Disagreement between” the two houses can the President adjourn them.

TOMORROW: Another chronicler.

“Told John Hancock Esqr. that he heard me say in a threatning manner”

The newly released first volume of The Papers of John Hancock, covering the years 1754–1769, doesn’t even have an index entry for Samuel Adams. Hancock was politically active in that time, as a Boston selectman and representative in the Massachusetts General Court. But he did his politicking in person, not in (preserved) letters or newspaper essays.

In contrast, the first volume of the Writings of Samuel Adams, covering 1764–1769, includes a couple of items defending Hancock from charges of fomenting riots: a 1768 letter written for the signature of House speaker Thomas Cushing and a 1769 newspaper essay signed “Candidus.” Hancock also served on several committees with Adams, but Adams gets the credit (via a descendant’s biography) for creating those committees’ documents.

In those corpuses, the first sign of a rift between Hancock and Adams appears in a 15 Dec 1771 “Memorandum” that Adams wrote for himself after a conversation with the colony’s deputy treasurer:

This day I waited on Mr. Harrison Gray junr. to acquaint him that I had been informd that he had told John Hancock Esqr. that he heard me say in a threatning manner that Mr. Hancock might think as he pleasd, Mr. [James] Otis had friends & his (Mr. Hancocks) treatment of Mr. Otis would prejudice his (Mr. Hancocks) Election.

Mr. Gray declard to me that he did not hear me mention a Word of Mr. Hancocks Election—that a conversation happend between Mr. John Cotton [deputy secretary of Massachusetts] & myself (Mr. Gray being present) relative to Mr. Otis—that Mr. Cotton said Mr. Otis’ Conduct must be the Effect of Distraction or Drunkeness—that I said I did not think so—but that it rather proceeded from Irritation—that he (Mr. Gray) said if Mr. Otis is distracted why should Mr. Hancock pursue him—& that I answerd that Mr. Hancock might be stirred up by others to do it, but I thought he had better not or it was a pity he should.

This Mr. Gray declared was all that I said relative to Mr. Hancock, in answer to his Question as is before mentiond & that it did not appear to him that I discoverd the least Unfriendliness towards Mr. Hancock. He further said he was willing to give his oath to the truth of this his declaration.

Upon which I told Mr. Gray that it was far from my Intention to make Mr. Hancock displeasd with him, that I was satisfied that Mr. Hancock understood him differently & I should let Mr. Hancock know what he now said, & asked him to repeat it which he did precisely as before—& told me he was freely willing that I should repeat it to Mr. Hancock that if Mr. Hancock & myself desired it he would thus explain it in presense of us both.

Here’s the scan of that document from the New York Public Library.

At this time, Boston had reelected James Otis, Jr., to the House after a year off, hoping he would regain his sanity and efficacy as a legislative leader. Instead, Otis became more inclined to support royal policy and then more irrational, as I discussed back here.

In November, acting in his capacity as a probate judge after a request from the Otis family, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson asked the Boston selectmen to assess whether Otis was “a Non Compos Distracted or Lunatick Person.” The selectmen, including Hancock, decided he needed a guardian. On 3 December, Otis was “carried off…in a post chaise, bound hand and foot,” for treatment.

Samuel Adams’s memorandum doesn’t say when he discussed Otis with Cotton and Gray. Adams had tried to gloss over the situation: Otis was acting from “Irritation,” he insisted, not “Distraction or Drunkeness.” As to why Hancock thought otherwise, he “might be stirred up by others.”

This episode belies the common picture, pushed by Loyalists and adopted by many authors since, that Adams was the savvy politician pulling Hancock’s strings. Not only was Hancock breaking from Adams, but the merchant had a better sense of the situation. Otis needed help, and he was losing popular support. In the spring of 1772, the North End Caucus (in my reading) and then the Boston town meeting chose never to vote for him again.

The memorandum does show Adams’s keen judgment about what could annoy Hancock, however. Adams had heard, quite possibly from Hancock himself, that Gray had described him as speaking “in a threatning manner.” And what was Adams supposedly threatening? Hancock’s popularity and prospects for reelection. Adams recorded this evidence to show Hancock that he’d said no such thing.

Without this memorandum in writing, we’d have no evidence of Adams worrying that Hancock thought he’d revealed “Unfriendliness” in the fall of 1771.

TOMORROW: Matters come to a head.

“They Assured me he wished to be seperated from Mr Adams”

I dug into the early-1770s rift between John Hancock on Samuel Adams the old-fashioned way: By pulling books about those men off my shelves, looking in their indexes, reading the relevant passages, and tracking down the citations.

The earliest signs of trouble appear in the letters of acting governor Thomas Hutchinson, which the Colonial Society of Massachusetts is publishing in a series edited by John W. Tyler.

On 5 June 1771, Hutchinson wrote to a correspondent in Britain, probably John Pownall in the Colonial Office:

I can mention to you what will appear improper in a publick Letter. I was much pressed by many persons well affected in general to consent to the Election of Mr Hancock [to the Council] his connections being large which are strongly prejudiced against me for the frequent refusal to accept of him in Office. They Assured me he wished to be seperated from Mr Adams another Representative of the Town an Incendiary equal to any at present in London and, if I would admit him to the Council, they had no doubt there would be an end to the Influence he now has, by means of his property, in the Town of Boston.

As there had been no advances on his part I could not think it proper for me to follow their advice. I have now reason to think that before another Election he will alter his conduct so far as to justify my acceptance of him which certainly will take off that sowerness of temper from many People which his negatives occasion and unless you think it a step not advisable I believe I shall accept of him.

Hutchinson didn’t state why he believed Hancock would change his behavior. The merchant hadn’t spoken to the acting governor himself. Some men friendly to the royal government (“persons well affected”) had.

Months later, Hutchinson was more confident. On 1 December, he told Gen. Thomas Gage in New York:

The pretenders to Patriotism [in] this Province have always followed the Example of those who make the like pretences in England. They are now quarrelling among themselves. Hancock has declared he will never again connect himself with Adams. They both have their Partizans & like [John] Wilkes & [Richard] Oliver they both declare they will never give up any part of the Cause of Liberty.

Two days later, Hutchinson told his predecessor, Sir Frances Bernard: “At present H & A are at great variance. Some of my friends blow the coals & I hope to see a good effect.”

He wrote to Bernard again on 29 Jan 1772:

If it was not for the Faction in this Town I think the Province would be easy with one Session in a year & it would be enough for the necessary business. This Faction seems to be breaking. The Doctor [Benjamin] Church who wrote the Times is now a writer on the side of Government. Hancock has not been with their club for two months past & seems to have a new set of acquaintance. By means of [Timothy] Folger there have been some overtures. I remember what passed between him & you & therefore shall act with greater caution. His coming over will be a great loss to them as they support themselves with his money.

And finally Hutchinson ventured to describe the situation in an official letter to the Secretary of State for North America, Lord Hillsborough, on 31 January, albeit in veiled fashion: “A Gentleman who has assisted them much by his money and by the reputation which his fortune gives him among the people seems weary of them and I have reason to think is determined to leave them.”

Meanwhile, Adams had sensed some trouble and tried to mend the relationship.

TOMORROW: All a misunderstanding?

Mapping Samuel Adams’s Declining Opinion of John Hancock

Among the intriguing questions posed to the A.I. program on the John Hancock Papers website is: “What did Hancock think about Sam ADams”?

The relationship of John Hancock and Samuel Adams fascinated people during their careers, and it continues to be interesting.

I even consulted on a picture book about the two men: Most Wanted, written by Sarah Jane Marsh and illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham.

When I thought about how I’d answer the question, my mind went to several historical moments:

• The Rev. William Gordon’s anecdote about how Adams “artfully nominated” Hancock for the Massachusetts General Court ahead of John Rowe.
• Adams’s 11 May 1770 letter to Hancock when the merchant wanted to resign from that legislature after not receiving a unanimous vote in the town meeting, assuring him he was “a most valueable Member.”
• Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s (probably unrealistic) hope in the early 1770s to woo Hancock away from Adams with a seat on the Council, a militia command, and other rewards.
• The Boston Whigs’ choice of Hancock to deliver the Massacre memorial oration in 1774, cementing his place in the radical camp.
• Hancock and Adams’s activity on 18–19 Apr 1775, including Gordon’s “glorious morning” anecdote.
• The disagreement between Hancock and Adams over whether they should let the crowd pull their carriage as they entered New York City—at least as reported later by the Adams family.
• Adams’s opposition to a ball in honor of Martha Washington which John and Dorothy Hancock planned to attend.
• The growing divide between Hancock and Adams during the Second Continental Congress, as recalled by John Adams in his autobiography’s comment about March 1776: “Mr. Samuel Adams had become very bitter against Mr. Hancock and spoke of him with great Asperity, in private Circles, and this Alienation between them continued…”
• The dispute within the Congress over whether it should thank Hancock when he resigned as chair in October 1777.
• Samuel Adams’s catty comments about politicians susceptible to flattery in letters to James Warren that same month.

All those data points, however, come from Samuel Adams or others. The question posed is what Hancock thought of Adams.

TOMORROW: Ups and downs.

“Acts of government could be resisted when they threatened the essential rights”

Jack Rakove is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies emeritus at Stanford University, with parallel appointments in political science and law.

He’s the author of respected books of Revolutionary-era history, including Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1997), James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic, and Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America.

In other words, Rakove has worked largely in political history and how the Framers translated ideas into laws and policies for the new nation. When he uses the term radical, as in his 2020 book Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion, he’s talking about the ideas of the Founders in their eighteenth-century context, not about the importance of now noting how hierarchical those men’s lifestyles were.

That’s something to bear in mind while reading Rakove’s essay for the Washington Monthly earlier this month, “Playing the Grinch at America’s 250th Birthday Party.”

In that essay Rakove writes:

Last June, I attended a conference on The American Revolution and the Constitution held at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. It was the seventh of eight conferences that AEI has been holding on the 250th anniversary of independence. Given its conservative orientation, any conference sponsored by AEI would predictably take a celebratory turn, and so did this one. My own paper on “The Invention of American Constitutionalism” fits well within that framework. . . .

Yet at the conference dinner that followed, I became the grinch who wanted to rob the other happy campers of their semiquincentennial joy. Yuval Levin, our gracious host and convenor, started our post-dessert conversation by asking me, “What do you think the celebration of the 250th anniversary of independence will be like?”

“I think it is going to be a complete disaster,” I replied, and offered a few reasons to support that view. The most important one, directly relevant to our subject, was that the constitutional system is lurching toward collapse and outright failure.

That link leads to Rakove’s article from last June, “It’s Not Just a Constitutional Crisis in the Trump Era. It’s Constitutional Failure.” Having spent a career studying how the Constitution was supposed to work, he’s watching it not work that way at all.

Rakove discerns some hope in what his graduate-school colleague Pauline Maier described as “extra-legal resistance” in her excellent book From Resistance to Revolution:

In the colonies as in Britain, communities believed that certain acts of government could be resisted when they threatened the essential rights and interests of the king’s subjects. Various kinds of uprisings, riotous events, and militant protests did occur during the colonial era of our history. From the perspective of imperial officials representing the British crown, these protests were illegal acts to be repressed or punished. Ship captains in the Royal Navy believed they were acting legally when they forcefully impressed sailors for their warships. Merchant seamen, shipyard workers, or ordinary individuals innocently strolling the streets thought otherwise. When anti-impressment riots occurred, they enjoyed the community’s full support.

This tradition was well established before the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765 disrupted imperial politics. Some of the earliest protests against the Stamp Act were indeed too violent. It was one thing to intimidate individuals who thought they had received lucrative appointments as stamp collectors into resigning their commissions. That was the easiest way to halt the enforcement of the Stamp Act. It was another matter entirely to ransack the residences of royal officials, notably including the Boston mansion of Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor and chief justice of Massachusetts. . . .

In the past few weeks, Minneapolis has become our Boston, and its citizens have become modern Sons of Liberty. Far more important, they and their counterparts in other communities have unknowingly revived the strategy of resistance that American communities deployed between the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765 and the crisis of independence. Blowing whistles, tailing ICE and Border Patrol vehicles, blaring airhorns outside the hotels where their agents are hopefully spending sleepless nights—these are modern versions of the extra-legal resistance that Maier described.

The protesters aren’t the only people behaving outside the law, however. The Trump administration continues to put unconstitutional pressure on Minneapolis, this past week announcing a freeze on paying for medical benefits for anyone in the state of Minnesota. It’s tried that tactic before through the Department of Agriculture, and been stopped by federal courts, repeatedly. That sort of tyrannical action naturally prompts protests.

“Fully compensate for all the Insults and Indignities”?

Enemies to Their Country: The Marblehead Addressers and Consensus in the American Revolution is Nicholas W. Gentile’s first book, just published by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Timothy Symington’s review for the Journal of the American Revolution says:

Marblehead was an important fishing community, with an aristocracy created by the cod fishing industry. . . . the town’s harmony was threatened by the signatures of thirty-three residents to a letter published in the Essex Gazette in May 1774. The letter was a “send-off” to departing governor Thomas Hutchinson. . . . The thirty-three residents who added their names to the letter were hoping that Hutchinson would return to London and try to use his influence to calm the situation.

The letter thanked Hutchinson for his involvement on behalf of the fishing industry, and then ended on a conciliatory note: “‘We heartily wish you, Sir, a safe and prosperous Passage to Great-Britain, and when you arrive there may you find such a Reception, as shall fully compensate for all the Insults and Indignities which have been offered you.’”

The idea of apologizing to a man like Hutchinson was anathema to many who subscribed to the Patriot cause (which, at this point, meant a return to no taxation and stopping the abridgement of British liberties). Most of the Marblehead residents considered themselves Whigs and were incensed at the letter. Gentile describes the importance of everyone in the community at that time in history being on the same page. Giving up one’s individual needs for the common good helped to create social harmony. . . .

Most Addressers ended up offering recantations, and some then took active roles in fighting on the Patriot side after war broke out. Some Addressers were truly contrite and regretted signing the letter, claiming that they did not truly understand Hutchinson’s character. Other Addressers took a longer time to recant, which some did more than once since their first attempts were not accepted by the community. All Addressers did recant at some point, but some of them could not reconcile their politics for the good of the community.

The Marblehead Addresser I’ve written about most was John Pedrick, who after another century was turned into a Patriot hero through the stories of his daughter and granddaughter.

Gentile will speak about his book at the Marblehead Museum on Thursday, 6 November, at 7 P.M. For tickets to attend that event in person, go to this page. To watch online, go here. Tickets are $15, or $10 for museum members.

Boston’s “Sedan for Removing the Sick”

Lining up the sparse mentions of sedan chairs in colonial Boston reveals a clear pattern: they were used to transport sick people.

In 1674 the Rev. John Oxenbridge of the First Meetinghouse suffered a stroke while preaching the Thursday Lecture and “was carried home in a Cedan.”

Thirteen years later, Judge Samuel Sewall wrote in his diary: “Capt. Gerrish is carried in a Sedan to the Wharf and so takes Boat for Salem, to see if there he may find amendment of his Distemper.”

In May 1715, the newly reappointed governor Joseph Dudley was bed-ridden with gout. At the end of the month, Sewall wrote, he came to Boston and “was carried from Mr. Dudley’s to the Town-House in Cous. [William? Jeremiah?] Dummer’s Sedan: but twas too tall for the Stairs, so was fain to be taken out near the top of them.”

Yesterday I listed five times sedan chairs were advertised for sale in eighteenth-century Boston newspapers. I don’t think it was coincidence that four of those ads were estate sales, and the fifth seller died within two years. Those men might have acquired sedans as they or their wives became too ill to walk around.

Boston also had a public sedan chair, operated by the town itself. In March 1739, the Boston selectmen took note of “A Sedan, or Chair belonging to the Hon. Edward Hutchinson Esqr. which the Town has had the loan of for a considerable time.” One of those local elected officials was Thomas Hutchinson, and the sedan owner was his uncle. The selectmen decided that the chair “be effectually Repaired, and made fit for Use, in the best and frugal manner.”

That sedan chair became part of Boston’s public-health infrastructure. On 4 Jan 1757 the selectmen voted “that the Sedan for Removing the Sick be broke to Peices” and “Mr. [Isaac] Cazneau make a good Serviceable Sedan at the Charge of the Town.” Cazneau was a saddler.

In 1760 the Massachusetts General Court bought land in the sparsely populated western point of the Boston peninsula called “New Boston” for a new hospital. Four years later, the town suffered a serious smallpox epidemic. That appears in the selectmen’s records with an uptick in orders for the sedan chair to carry people to that hospital.

• 16 Jan 1764: “Information was given the Select men by Dr. [Phillip] Cast, that One Hallet who came from Newfoundland a Month past, and Boards at Mrs. Nicholsons in Fitches Alley, has the Symptoms of the Small Pox upon him whereupon the Select men endeavour’d to perswade him to consent to his being removed, and having obtain’d such consent, he was accordingly removed in the Sedan to the Province Hospital at New Boston.”
• 20 Jan 1764: “The Select men having prevailed with Mr. Adams to consent that his Child should be removed from his House to the Hospital at New Boston, they at about 12. OClock that Night took Mr. Williston and a number of hands with the Sedan to said House, when they received the Wet Nurse and Child and carried them to said Hospital”.

Similar entries appeared through August of that year.

TOMORROW: “Mr. Williston.”

(The picture above shows a sedan chair used to carry medical patients in La Paz, Bolivia, now in the Wellcome Collection in London.)

Thomas Newell and “that Detestable Tea”

Thomas Newell’s diary makes clear that he opposed Parliament’s tea tax in 1773, as most Bostonians did. On 2 December, for instance, he wrote about James Bruce bringing in the Eleanor with “116 Chest of that Detestable Tea.”

But what did Newell do to support that stance?

On 17 November the young man made clear he didn’t participate in the attack on the Clarke family’s warehouse, discussed back here: “This evening a number of persons assembled before Richard Clarke’s, Esq., one of the consignees of tea; they broke the windows, and did other damage. (I was at fire meeting this evening.)”

On 2 December, the same day Capt. Bruce arrived, Newell’s diary contains one of the longer bits of cipher in the diary. The word “Junr” is legible among the little symbols, and a squiggle that doesn’t fit the cipher turns out to be “St.” What was Newell hiding?

Not a whole lot, it turns out. Once deciphered, the line reads: “This Eving. was at St. Andrew’s Lodge, I was chosen Junr Deacon of said Lodge.” Well, good for Thomas Newell.

Some people credit that lodge of Freemasons with being at the heart of the anti-tea operation. (None give it more credit than the lodge itself.) And indeed Newell got more involved the next night.

On 3 December, Newell recorded: “This evening I was one of the watch on board of Captain Bruce (with twenty-four more), that has tea for the Clarkes & Co.” That patrol was to keep the tea from being landed so the tax could be collected.

Finally, here’s Thomas Newell’s account of 16 December:

Town and country sons mustered according to adjournment. The people ordered Mr. [Francis] Rotch, owner of Captain [James] Hall’s ship, to make a demand for a clearance of Mr. [Joseph] Harrison, the collector of the custom house (and he was refused a clearance for his ship). The body desired Mr. Rotch to protest against the custom-house, and apply to the governor for his pass for the castle. He applied accordingly, and the governor refused to give him one. The people, finding all their efforts to preserve the East India Company’s tea, at night dissolved the meeting. But behold what followed the same evening: a number of brave men (some say Indians), in less than three hours emptied every chest of tea on board the three ships, commanded by Captains Hall, Bruce, and [Hezekiah] Coffin (amounting to 342 chests), into the sea.

Was Newell among those “brave men”? I’d guess not. But he surely knew some of them.

A couple of details struck me Newell’s writing about the Boston tea protesters. First, he consistently referred to the people meeting in Old South Meeting-House as ”sons of liberty.” He didn’t worry about calling them the “body of the people.”

Second, in Newell’s telling the crowd that afternoon was trying “to preserve the East India Company’s tea.” By having it shipped back to Britain, that is. Would be a shame if anything else happened to it.

TOMORROW: A mystery name.

Richard Draper’s “Report of these Images”

As long as I’m discussing nomenclature for Boston’s political groups in the 1760s, I’ll tackle “the Union Club.”

America’s first public, outdoor demonstration against the Stamp Act took place along Boston’s main road on Wednesday, 14 Aug 1765. The big elm where the protesters hung effigies hadn’t yet been named Liberty Tree.

The next day, Richard Draper published his Boston News-Letter newspaper with a two-page supplement. It didn’t report on the protest, however—that sheet was entirely devoted to foreign news.

The News-Letter did print Gov. Francis Bernard’s 15 August proclamation of a reward for the rioters who had torn down stamp agent Andrew Oliver’s building the night before. That was the paper’s only description of the event.

Boston’s Whigs complained that Draper was tilting his coverage to please the royal government. In his 22 August issue the printer objected to the News-Letter being called “a Court-Paper…under the Controul of higher Powers.” He insisted:

IN regard to the Occurrences of last Week, we would observe, that it was out of our Power to give a perfect Account thereof, as the Transactions were not finished, and a partial one would perhaps have drawn down the Resentment of many of the true Sons of Liberty, and caused us to be more in Fear, than it is said were of publishing any Thing relating thereto:—

Had the Gentleman who furnished one of the Papers with a decent Account of the Affair, been so kind as to have sent us something of the same Nature, he would have saved himself the Trouble (if he really took the Trouble) to inform the Public that we filled an extraordinary Half Sheet with immaterial Foreign Articles.

The News-Letter’s account of the anti-Stamp Act protest, “as concise and true…as it is in our Power,” followed. In the details it agreed with the Monday newspapers, but it also included several sarcastic zings at the protest.

VERY early on Wednesday Morning, the 14th Instant, were discovered hanging on a Limb of the Great Trees, so called, at the South Part of this Town, two Effigies, one of which by the Labels appeared to be designed to represent a Stamp-Officer, the other a Jack-boot, with a Head and Horns peeping out of the Top. said by some of the Printers, to be the Devil or his Imp; but, as we are not acquainted with that Species of Gentlemen, we cannot so well determine whether it was an exact Resemblance or not:

The Report of these Images soon spread thro’ the Town, brought a vast Number of Spectators, and had such an Effect on them that they were immediately inspired with a Spirit of Patriotism, which diffus’d itself through the whole Concourse: So much were they affected with a Sense of Liberty, that scarce any could attend to the Task of Day-Labour; but all seemed on the Wing for Freedom.

About Dusk the Images were taken down, placed on a Bier, (not covered with a Sheet, except the Sheet of Paper which bore the Inscription) supported in Procession by six Men, followed by a great Concourse of People, some of the highest Reputation, and in the greatest Order, ecchoing forth, Liberty and Property! No Stamp! &c—

Having passed through the Town-House, they proceeded with their Pageantry down Kingstreet, and it is said intended for the North Part of the Town; but Orders being given, they turned their Course thro’ Kilbystreet, where an Edifice had been lately erected, which was suppos’d to be designed for a Stamp-Office.

Here they halted, and went to work to demolish that Building, which they soon effected, without receiving any Hurt, except one of the Spectators, who happened to be rather too nigh the Brick Wall when it fell: This being finished many of them loaded themselves with the wooden Trophies, and proceeded (bearing the two Effigies) to the Top of Fort-Hill; where a Fire was soon kindled, in which one of them was burnt; we can’t learn whether they committed the other to the Flames, or if they did whether it did not survive the Conflagration, being its said like the Salamander conversant in that Element.—

The Populace after this went to work on the Barn, Fence, Garden, and Dwelling-House, of the Gentleman against whom their Resentment was chiefly levelled, and which were contiguous to said Hill; and here entering the House they bravely showed their Loyalty, Courage, and Zeal, to defend the Rights and Liberties of Englishmen:——

Here, it is said, by some good Men that were present, they established their Society by the name of The Union Club.—

Their Business being finished, they retired, and proceeded to the Province-House, which was at about 11 o’Clock, gave three Huzzas, and all went quietly home.

The report went on to events of 15 August: Oliver’s resignation and an aborted action against Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s house.

The 19 August Boston Gazette offered a detailed and favorable description of the protest in its own two-page supplement. The same day’s Boston Evening-Post printed a positive report from “A.Z.,” who also got in the dig at Draper’s paper. The Boston Post-Boy, friendly to the royal government, ran nothing. None of the three Monday papers reprinted Gov. Bernard’s proclamation.

TOMORROW: The long and short of “The Union Club.”

“Admiral Renegado, came to anchor in Port Despair”

At the start of February 1770, the big news in Boston was the non-importation movement, and particularly the weekly demonstrations by schoolboys in support of it.

That is to say, every Thursday when the schools let out early, gangs of boys would converge on the shop of someone who hadn’t signed the non-importation agreement, set up a picket line, and shout insults at that shopkeeper and his or her customers. If the kids were feeling feisty, they’d throw snowballs and mud as well.

The Boston Chronicle, which opposed the movement, responded on 1 February with a fictional advertisement:

Intended speedily to be acted,
By a Company of young Tragedians,
A TRAGEDY
(Not acted here these seventy-eight years,)
called the
W I T C H E S,
With many Alterations and Improvements.

(The full item is quoted back here.)

That slammed the Whigs’ boycott, tweaked the town’s ban on theater, and poked at the sore spot of the Salem witchcraft trials all in one. It was masterful trolling before that term was invented.

Four days later, the Boston Chronicle fictionalized another common newspaper item with this start:

S H I P   N E W S.
January 25, 1770.
Last Tuesday Evening the “Well disposed” [i.e., Whiggish] fleet, under the command of ADMIRAL RENEGADO, came to anchor in Port Despair, having left their stations that morning in great confusion on the appearance of an English VICE ADMIRAL, with the British STANDARD flying at the mast head.

This was commentary on how William Molineux led a crowd to confront Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s two importer sons at his house—an action that even Josiah Quincy, Jr., had warned could be treated as treason—and how that action had fizzled out.

Exactly one month after the second article, the Boston Massacre occurred. To defuse tensions in the streets, Hutchinson decided to have the 29th and then the 14th Regiments moved to Castle William.

As a result, in the following months there was no governmental force in the streets of Boston strong enough to deter the Whigs and their supporters. Crowds tarred and feathered Customs officer Owen Richards in May and threatened Scottish merchant Patrick McMaster with the same punishment in June.

In that atmosphere, I suspect, the printing staff of the Boston Chronicle didn’t feel safe publishing another item lampooning and lambasting the local Whigs. Somebody in that shop—or perhaps more than one somebody—composed a long article that built on three items the paper had already run:

• Caricatures of prominent Whigs like “Tommy Trifle” and “Johnny Dupe” from October 1769’s “Outlines of the characters of…the Well-Disposed.”
• The fake theatrical announcement.
• The name “Admiral Renegado.”

Instead of publishing that piece in their own newspaper, however, they sent it to Anthony Henry in Halifax. Obviously, disguised gossip about Bostonians had less meaning for readers in Nova Scotia. But after he ran the piece on 8 May, it could filter back to its targets without sparking a riot. Not that any Boston printer dared to reprint it.

The October 1769 “Outlines of the characters of…the Well-Disposed” is always attributed to John Mein, publisher of the Boston Chronicle. He left a written key confirming the targets, so he was obviously involved in the production. But someone at the Boston Chronicle must have carried on in the same mode after Mein was driven away the next month. That person most likely wrote the piece published in Halifax.

TOMORROW: The most likely author.

“Another Mob to search for Ebenezer Richardson”

Ebenezer Richardson reportedly went into hiding in Philadephia in mid-October 1773, just as the tea crisis heated up.

For the next several weeks the biggest American ports were focused on the East India Company tea.

Richardson’s employers and protectors, the Customs Commissioners, took shelter at Castle William in Boston harbor, and probably others in the department were also lying low.

On 25 Jan 1774, a Boston mob attacked another Customs officer, John Malcom. He had threatened a boy and then clubbed the small shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes.

When local authorities tried to convince the crowd to release Malcom, men answered “that in case they let him go they might expect a like satisfaction as they had received in the cases of Richardson and the soldiers, and the other friends of government.” People resented Richardson’s royal pardon and didn’t want a repeat, just as they didn’t like the acquittals after the Boston Massacre.

The attack on John Malcom continued and became one of the most vicious and infamous of the pre-war years.

Two days later, someone reported seeing Richardson himself in Boston. Richard Draper’s 28 January Boston News-Letter said:

It having been reported that the noted Ebenezer Richardson, was seen in Town, a Number of People were in Pursuit of him last Evening, but could not find him.

That same day, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wrote to the Secretary of State, Lord Dartmouth, about the attack on Malcom and added:

there was an Attempt made to raise another Mob to search for Ebenezer Richardson, lately found guilty for Murder, but Judgment being suspended, His Majesty’s Pardon was applied for & obtained. He is now in some very inferior Employment in the Service of the Customs in Pensilvania, and it is thought a Report of his being in Town was spread for the sake of raising a Mob. Some of the more considerate People appeared & opposed the Leaders in the beginning of the Affair and put a Stop to it.

Hutchinson obviously believed Richardson was still in Philadelphia.

Richardson’s own statement to Dartmouth in January 1775 was skimpy on dates and other specifics about his movements:

after your petitioner was dischargd the Commissioners of the Customs Perocured for your Petitioner a place in Pennaslavania but the peopel of boston sent after and [???] the mob in Pennaslavania so that your petitioner could not shew his head there.

At some point in late 1773 or early 1774, Ebenezer Richardson did make his way back to Massachusetts.

TOMORROW: Meeting with the governor.

“A proper Person to be employed in the REVENUE”

On 10 Mar 1772, as described yesterday, Massachusetts’s high court delivered a royal pardon to Ebenezer Richardson, convicted twenty-three months earlier of murder.

According to one of the judges on that court, Peter Oliver, “The Prisoner fled the Town immediately on his Discharge; the Rabble heard of it, & pursued him to execute their own Law upon him, but he happily escaped.”

Gov. Thomas Hutchinson reported to his predecessor, Sir Francis Bernard, that the “poor fellow who has been in close prison more than two years…hapned to be discharged when the Inhabitants of the Town were engaged in an Affair at their annual meeting & by this means we saved a tumult at least if nothing more.”

Richardson still had family north of Boston in the Woburn/Stoneham/Reading area, so he probably lay low there. I haven’t found clues about his second wife Kezia and their children.

For a decade before his conviction Richardson had worked for the Customs service. The Commissioners of Customs appear to have eventually found another place for him—a distant place.

Or, as Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette put it on 24 May 1773:

As an additional Affront to the Feelings of his Countrymen; as an aggravated Outrage on the Sensibility, Humanity, Virtue and Justice of this People; as a Master Stroke of rancorous Enormity, to put to the Rack the most obstinate Quietist: BE IT KNOWN;

that the cringing, smiling, fawning, bowing CHARLES FROTH, Esq; a Wretch, who from his earliest Puppy-hood, thro’ the lingering Progress of a too-long protracted Life, to a Period when he withers on the Crutch of Decrepitude, might challenge his recording Angel to produce one single Action, that sifted to it’s Motive, would not effectually consign him to eternal Infamy; has, O! unparalelled Effrontery! O! the detestable Parricide! has appointed that execrable Villain, the condemned Vagabond; the rank, bloody, and as yet unhanged EBENEZER RICHARDSON, an Officer in the Customs in the Port of Philadelphia.

And what is infinitely aggravating, and renders the Transaction much more atrocious; the Murderer is distinguished by a particular Recommendation to the Collector and Comptroller of that Port; declaring the Miscreant to be a distinguished Friend to Government, a proper Person to be employed in the REVENUE, and ordering them to reward him with a Guinea per Week.——

As the said Ebenezer Richardson is now placed on the Ladder of Promotion, we may expect him one of the Honorable Board of Commissioners, in a few Years; where he may probably make as distinguished a Figure as the Rest of his BRETHREN.

“Charles Froth” was the Whigs’ usual insult for Customs Commissioner Charles Paxton (shown above), who had employed Richardson as a confidential informer soon after he moved to Boston. As you might guess, Paxton was about as unpopular as Richardson himself.

TOMORROW: Shifting to Philadelphia.

The Sentencing of Ebenezer Richardson

On 21 Apr 1770, as recounted back here, a Suffolk County jury found Ebenezer Richardson guilty of murdering young Christopher Seider.

The judges had instructed the jurors that all the evidence indicated Richardson had fired his gun in self-defense as a crowd attacked his house and family, so the worst they could convict him of was manslaughter. Judge Peter Oliver insisted that the facts showed Richardson was innocent of any crime.

The jurors ignored those instructions and came back with a guilty verdict. And the law provided only one punishment for a convicted murderer: death.

Instead of passing that sentence immediately, the judges adjourned the court.

The next time they met, one judge was ill, so they once again didn’t pass sentence.

In September, the judges called the jurors back into court to ask about their deliberation, whether the angry crowd in the courtroom had influenced them. The judges were seeking any reason to overturn the verdict. But no opportunity presented itself.

Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wrote to his superiors in London, seeking a royal pardon for Richardson. He could have issued a pardon himself as governor, but he didn’t want to take all the heat for that decision.

In February 1771, the London ministry responded by sending back notice that the king (which really meant the privy council) had put Richardson in for a pardon.

Ever the stickler, Hutchison thought that paperwork had to be complete to stand up to scrutiny. He asked for something clearer, more legalistic.

Meanwhile, Richardson was still in the Boston jail. That was when the press referred to him by such epithets as “the rank, bloody, and as yet unhanged Ebenezer Richardson.”

Richardson’s mother died while he was imprisoned.

On 10 Mar 1772, the Boston town meeting scheduled a discussion of William Molineux’s petition that he shouldn’t have to pay back money the town had loaned him to fund a public-works spinning project. Molineux brought supporters to Faneuil Hall to press for his case. Ultimately, justice Richard Dana stated the law didn’t allow for a loan like that to be forgiven. But the town didn’t press for the overdue repayment, either.

That same day (which wasn’t a coincidence), the royal judges summoned Richardson from jail. On 3 March, new paperwork had arrived from London, and Hutchinson passed it on to the judges. The 12 March Boston News-Letter reported what followed:

The Case of Ebenezer Richardson, who by Verdict of a Jury was found Guilty of the Murder of Christopher Seider, having been certified and laid before the King, His Majesty has been pleased to grant his most gracious Pardon, the Evidence of which, in the usual Form being laid before the Judges of the Superior-Court on Tuesday last, and the said Richardson having then entred into Recognizance to plead the said Pardon, when called upon, he was liberated from Prison where he has been confined above two Years.

Ebenezer Richardson was free. But of course he was still the most hated man in Boston.

TOMORROW: Fleeing the town.

The Flight of the Cambridge Loyalists, part 3

When the ministry in London chose supportive gentlemen for the Council under the Massachusetts Government Act, one was William Vassall (1715–1800, shown here with his son Leonard wanting help with homework).

William was the last male in his generation of Vassalls, thus the head of a wealthy Anglican family that generally supported the Crown.

However, he wasn’t a politician, and former governor Thomas Hutchinson called him “naturally timid.” And since marrying Margaret Hubbard, he was living on her very nice estate in Bristol, Rhode Island.

On 25 August, Gov. Thomas Gage wrote to Secretary of State Dartmouth that William Vassall was among three men who “plead age and infirmities, but I believe choose to avoid the present disputes.” Those disputes were taking the form of angry rural crowds pressuring the new-fangled mandamus Councilors to resign or leave town.

Some of William’s relatives witnessed the even bigger crowds in Cambridge on 2 Sept 1774, later dubbed the “Powder Alarm.” His niece Elizabeth was married to Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver, and his sisters Susanna and Anna were the wives of George Ruggles and John Borland, respectively.

And then there was William’s nephew John Vassall, owner of the richest estate in Cambridge—now the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

As a rich country gentleman, John Vassall had the usual appointments of justice of the peace and militia colonel. But he’d never sought to serve in a political office.

Until that week. On the morning of 2 September, Gov. Gage wrote to Dartmouth:

I have given Your Lordship in my letter of this date, the names of several of the New Council who desire to resign their Seats; and I have now the honour to transmit you the names of Three Gentlemen who desire to be of the Council, vizt.—Mr. John Vassall of Cambridge, Mr. Eliakim Hutchinson, and Mr. Nathaniel Hatch.

John Vassall probably thought that by joining the Council he would not only be supporting his king but also stepping up act as head of the family.

When he wrote, Gage didn’t know that thousands of men with sticks were marching along the road in front of John Vassall’s house. Nor did those men know that John Vassall had volunteered to be on the Council.

At that moment only John Vassall knew how close he was to receiving a summons from those thousands of men, as Joseph Lee and Samuel Danforth did. By the end of the day, he and his wife must have heard from their siblings, Elizabeth and Thomas Oliver, about the threatening crowd that surrounded the lieutenant governor’s house and demanded he resign.

In 1784, John Vassall told the British government’s Loyalists Commission: “He was afraid of the Mob who knew his principles & he went to Boston a Day or two after Govr. Oliver’s House was attacked.” 

On 23 Feb 1775, the Boston News-Letter published a long article about how various Loyalists had been driven from their homes. It said: “Col. Vassall, of Cambridge, from intolerable threats, and insolent treatment to his friends and himself, has left his elegant seat there, and retired to Boston, with his amiable family, for protection.”

The lack of specific examples of “insolent treatment” and Vassall’s report of leaving Cambridge within a couple of days after the “Powder Alarm” suggest that there may not have been many real confrontations. But there was a lot of real fear.

In the fall of 1774 the London government sent a writ of mandamus appointing John Vassall and others to the Council. On 15 December, Gov. Gage wrote back: “Messrs. Erving, Vassal and Hatch have accepted the honour conferred upon them, but desire that it may be kept secret for a time, and that they may not be called upon till they are prepared.”

The next Council meeting Gage convened was on 17 July. But Vassall didn’t participate. In 1784 he told the Loyalists Commission that “he was never sworn in owing to an Accident which made him lame.” Natural timidity might have run in the family.