“Lucky for the Town that the Fire broke out in the Day Time”?

Just above its report on the Royal Navy store ship that caught fire in Boston harbor on 29 May 1773 (quoted yesterday), Richard Draper’s Boston News-Letter ran this brief item about another event that same day:

Saturday last being the Anniversary of the Restoration of King Charles II. a Feu de Joy was fired on board the Men of War in this Harbour.

Ordinarily, royal anniversaries like the king’s and queen’s birthdays were celebrated by both civil and military authorities in Boston. In this case, there was a conspicuous absence of cannon salutes, bell-ringing, or toasts inside the town.

New England had generally supported the Parliamentary side in the English Civil War and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell that followed. Its people and elected officials shielded regicides from Charles II’s retribution. Most British people thought the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was a Good Thing, but New Englanders were particularly convinced that deposing the Stuarts was a necessary course correction as the kingdom sank back into papist tyranny.

Therefore, local forts and authorities didn’t join the Royal Navy in celebrating the Stuart Restoration that May day in 1773. But did the descendants of Puritans begrudge the military’s action?

Of course they did. Thomas and John Fleet’s Boston Evening-Post reported the same event this way:

Saturday last being the anniversary of the Nativity and Restoration of King CHARLES II. the Colours, (as usual on Red Letter Days) were displayed on board the Flag Ship here, and at One o’Clock a Feu de Joy from her and the Gibraltar (being the only Ships of War we had then here to protect us) was all the Notice, as we have yet heard, that was taken to honor the Memory of the execrable Race of the STEUART Family.

Even the newspaper’s use of the phrase “Red Letter Days” was fraught with meaning. Those were the saints’ days on the Anglican calendar, shunned by the Puritans. As late as 1758 Roger Sherman had to explain why he acknowledged those dates in the almanacs he published “to serve the Publick” of Connecticut despite being a devout Congregationalist.

As for the radical Boston Gazette, it didn’t mention the anniversary of Charles II’s coronation at all. But Edes and Gill’s report on the ship catching fire was highly political:

Saturday last about 12 o’Clock at Noon a Fire broke out on board the Britannia, Capt. John Walker, a Store Ship for the Fleet station’d here for the Protection of the Trade and Fishery, lying in the Harbour, and within Gunshot of the Town.

It being reported that there was a considerable Quantity of Powder on board, it put the Inhabitants in great Consternation. Thousands of People seeking Refuge from the falling of Chimneys, &c. in Case of an Explosion. However as it turn’d out, there was no Powder on Board; which if it had at first been ascertain’d, would have sav’d said Ship from being burnt almost to the Water’s Edge. Considerable Stores we hear were not consumed.

It is however some what lucky for the Town that the Fire broke out in the Day Time, and when only the People belonging to the Ship were on board, otherwise it might have been Matter of Representation to the Board of Admiralty at Home to have immediately fitted out a Fleet in order to apprehend certain Persons to be sent beyond the Seas to be tried, as in the Case of the Gaspee Schooner at Rhode-Island.

Be it as it may, this Accident may prove very beneficial to some in settling Accounts.

In this one report the Boston Gazette thus managed to suggest that:

• The idea that Royal Navy warships were in the harbor to protect locals instead of threatening them was laughable.
• Naval administrators were to blame for the slow firefighting response.
• Authorities like Thomas Hutchinson would have been happy to add this fire to their list of false accusations about Boston.
• The royal government was acting unconstitutionally in the Gaspee inquiry.
• Some corrupt officials or contractors would use the fire to cover up embezzling or other crimes.

That was some impressive conspiracy theorizing.

I should note that the fire was seen at noon, the cannon salute to Charles II at 1:00 P.M. So locals couldn’t have set fire to the ship to protest the royalist celebration. On the other hand, navy commanders might have been more eager to salute the Stuart Restoration after seeing their store ship burning out of control in Boston harbor.

“John Malcom returns thanks to Almighty God”

Like pretty much everything else in colonial Boston, the mobbing of John Malcolm had a religious aspect.

Malcolm’s parents had migrated from Ireland in 1721, and before that the family was from Scotland. When he married and had children in the 1750s, Malcolm did so in the Rev. John Moorhead’s Presbyterian meeting-house.

(That congregation eventually evolved into the Arlington Street Church. Its surviving eighteenth-century records have been digitized by Harvard, and the image above comes from a book of baptisms. Good luck using that source.)

In 1769, Malcolm made a career change and joined the Customs service. His first station was in Newport, Rhode Island. The Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles recorded in his diary the difficulties Malcolm found in worshipping there:

24 [Feb 1770]. I am told that Mr. Malcom last week signified his Desires to some of the Brethren of the first Cong. Chh. here to partake with them in the Lord’s Supper last Lords day. His motion was declined.

He is an officer in the Customs here: lately removed from Boston & settled here, & with his Family attends that Meeting. Tho’ a Congregationalist, yet not Member in Communion. with any Congrega. Chh: yet to qualify for an office had received the Sacrament at an Episcopal Chh., I think in Boston.

It is the declared principle of our Churches to receive to occasional Communion, any sober Communicants from any protestant Chhs., as Episco., Bapt., &c., if they should desire it. He pleaded this right. But the scruple arose on his Morals, which are exceptionable.

There’s no clue about what made Malcolm morally objectionable, if it wasn’t simply joining the Customs service. In 1771 he attended Stiles’s own meeting six times before leaving New England for his next assignment.

This episode shows a couple of things. First, Malcolm wanted to be part of a congregation. He preferred independent meetings, though reportedly was willing to take communion in an Anglican church if it would help his career with the royal government. I haven’t seen any evidence about where the Malcolm family was worshipping when he was back in Boston in the winter of 1773–1774.

The first newspaper essay to discuss religion in connection to the January 1774 crowd attack on Malcolm in fact never appeared in a newspaper. But in announcing that he declined to print that essay in the 3 February Boston News-Letter, Richard Draper got the main point across:

VERITAS, his Observations on the Method of Punishment inflicted on J. Malcom, in a Place professing the Christian Religion, cannot be inserted.—He concludes “I would have every one punished that is deserving of it.—But would not have it to be said by the INDIANS, We are SAVAGES.”

In other words, the violence of the attack on Malcolm made Bostonians look bad, even to people that community stereotyped as violent.

During his recovery, Malcolm himself released a couple of public statements. The Boston Evening-Post was the first to publish one, on 14 February:

Yesterday se’nnight [i.e., Sunday, 6 February] the following Note, it’s said, was sent to several Churches in this Town, viz.

“John Malcom desires Prayers of the Christian People of this Congregation, that the vile abuse received on the 25th Day or Evening of January last past, from a vile rebellious Mob, without Provocation, may be sanctified to him and his Family; and that he may bless God that his Usefulness is still spared, and that he is greatly recovered from his dreadful Wounds and Bruises he then received from the bloody and cruel Hands of these cruel Mortals here below.—

May God forgive them!

Just above that item the Fleet brothers printed a warning to peddlers not to sell tea, that paragraph ending with the threat of “a modern Dress.—Remember Pedlar Malcom’s Fate!” So that writer wasn’t in the same forgiving mood.

On 17 March, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy published Malcolm’s next message:

Last Sunday se’nnight [i.e., Sunday, 6 March], the following curious note was sent to several churches in this town, and we hear was read at one of them, viz.

“John Malcom returns thanks to Almighty God, that again he is able to wait on him again in the public worship, after the cruel and barbarous usage of a cruel and barbarous mob in Boston, on the 25th evening of January last past confined him to house, bed and room.

“March 6, 1775.”

I haven’t found any response to these items questioning Malcolm’s faith or choice of denomination, or arguing against the point they all made about how Jesus told people to treat their enemies. Most people seem to have preferred to let that topic drop.

“Some of the principal Venders of TEA in Boston”

Last month Prof. Carl Robert Keyes’s Advertisements 250 project highlighted a couple of notices that appeared one on top of the other in the 20 Dec 1774 Boston Evening-Post.

The first was dated 17 December, the day after the Boston Tea Party, and came from “some of the principal Venders of TEAS in Boston.” They were calling a meeting of all the merchants and shopkeepers selling tea to discuss how to respond to the public call for a complete boycott.

Just below that notice, the Fleet brothers printed the advertisement of Cyrus Baldwin, a young merchant. He was offering:

Choice Bohea and Souchong Teas,
Hyson Ditto, at 18s. L.M. [lawful money] per Pound, Indigo, and a small Parcell of Parchment Deerskins &c.—

N.B. The above Teas were imported before any of the East-India Company’s Tea arrived, or it was known they would send any on their own Account.

In other words, Baldwin (or his importer) had paid the Townshend duty on that tea, but before the commodity had become so politically charged.

Keyes noted four other people advertising tea in the same newspaper: “Archibald Cunningham, William Jackson, Samuel Allyne Otis, and Elizabeth Perkins.” None of them included the same disclaimer in their ads that Baldwin did, but tea was just one of the goods they offered. For Baldwin, tea was his main business.

Jackson kept his family’s hardware shop at the Brazen Head and had already become notorious in 1770 as one of the last people defying the non-importation movement. Cunningham was a native of Scotland and also supported the Crown.

Otis, in contrast, was the younger brother of James Otis, Jr., and Mercy Warren, closely tied to the Whigs. Baldwin also favored the Whigs, though not enthusiastically when their politics threatened his business.

As for Perkins, she had been recently widowed at age forty. Her late husband was the merchant James Perkins, and her father (and his mentor) was the wealthy hatter Thomas Handysyd Peck. Elizabeth had therefore been watching the import business all her life, and she was determined to support her children with a shop.

The business of selling tea thus cut across political lines in Boston—yet it had now become political. In the Boston Post-Boy that same day, the notice about the tea vendors’ meeting urged unity: “A common Cause is best supported by a common Association.” If only 90% of the town’s shopkeepers stopped selling tea, then the remaining 10% would benefit from all of that business, and that was a recipe for resentment.

On 29 December, Boston’s tea merchants declared they would stop selling tea after 20 January. And, even though customers might be wanting to stock up in the next three weeks, they wouldn’t take advantage of that situation by raising their prices above a certain level.

Still, that left Cyrus Baldwin with unsold tea. Back in 2015 Chris Hurley recounted what he tried to do with his stock, and what happened next, starting here.

As for the other people advertising tea in the 20 Dec 1773 Boston Evening-Post, Jackson and Cunningham became Loyalists, leaving Boston during the war. Otis parlayed his political connections into being the secretary of the U.S. Senate for its first twenty-five years.

Elizabeth Perkins did well enough in business to be able to make large charitable contributions after the war. One of her sons, Thomas Handysyd Perkins, did even better in the opium trade—another commodity fraught with political meaning.

“For the further amusement of the Town”

On 11 Oct 1773, 250 years ago today, Jacob Bates ran his last advertisement in the Boston newspapers.

It appeared in the Boston Post-Boy, repeating his announcement in the 7 October Boston News-Letter that his performance at 2:00 P.M. on the 12th would be his last in town. Unless it rained. In which case, he’d perform “the first fair Day after.” But that would be “Positively the last Time here.”

That same day, Thomas and John Fleet at the Boston Evening-Post ran this item sent in by a reader (and set in small type to fit it all in):

Messi’rs FLEETS,

AS the extraordinary feats of Horsemanship now performing here by Mr. Bates, has much engrossed the attention of the Town; please to insert, for the further amusement of the Town, the substance of an Advertisement to be seen in the London Ledger of last July, relative to the more astonishing Performances of the famous Mr. Wildman,

“who lets any Person in company cut off the Head of a living Cock, Hen, or other Fowl, and he will immediately join the Head to the Body again in the presence of the company, and the Fowl shall be alive and perfectly well as before the operation—

He will likewise exhibit many astonishing Performances with his Oriental Caskets, and several Pieces of new invented Machinery—

He tells the Ladies and Gentlemen Thoughts by several methods never attempted by any other Person—

He puts a Piece of Money into a Lady or Gentleman’s hand, and takes it away without their knowledge, let them hold it ever so fast—

And fifty other different astonishing Deceptions with Cards, Money & Watches, that cannot possibly be inserted in his Bill.—

He concludes with his much admired exhibition of Bees, when he will command them the leave the Hive, and settle on any Gentleman’s Handkerchief, Sword, Cane, or any other part the Company shall request; from thence he will order them to settle on his naked arm, representing a swarm of Bees on the Boughs of a Tree; he will then remove them from his Arm to his naked Head and Face in a most extraordinary manner; and afterwards makes them march over the Table at the word of Command:—

He likewise offers to give One Hundred Guineas if his Performances can be equalled by any Person in the Kingdom.”——

The Connecticut Journal of New Haven had run a similar item from the London press back on 20 August. Similar but not identical—that announcement about the feats of “Mr. Wildman” included cutting off the head of a cock and card tricks, but it said nothing about bees.

The Connecticut newspaper didn’t add any editorial comment. The Boston Evening-Post’s correspondent tied the material to public interest in Jacob Bates. But what point was he (or she) trying to make?

Was this correspondent criticizing the Boston public for its fascination with a showman? The apparently admonitory “Bates and his Horses” pamphlet would be advertised in the Post-Boy another week, though since no copies survive it’s not certain it was ever printed.

But perhaps this Evening-Post reader simply wanted to share another curious glimpse of London-based entertainment. If you think Bates’s horsemanship is impressive, you ain’t seen nothin’!

If we lived in that society, the implications of reprinting the description of Wildman’s act for the Boston public might be clearer. Or perhaps people had just as much trouble discerning tone and irony in print then as now.

TOMORROW: Wildman and his horses.

(The playing card above comes from this set, courtesy of Harvard, showing people caught up in the South Sea Bubble early in the 1700s.)

“Major Barber was declared rebel”

On Monday, 19 Sept 1774, the Fleet brothers’ Boston Evening-Post reprinted the article from the New-York Gazetteer that I’ve been discussing, listing eighteen Boston men as “authors” of rebellion in Massachusetts.

That article took the form of a letter “To the Officers and Soldiers of his Majesty’s Troops at Boston.”

One obvious question is: Did those men get the message? Did that newspaper item have any effect?

For an answer, I point to the 3 October Boston Gazette. It contained a long letter from Enoch Brown, who owned a house and store on the Boston Neck. On the map shown here, it’s the building with a label in the lower left corner.

Writing to Edes and Gill on 24 September, Brown detailed a dispute with the British army that he said started a week before.

(Army officers argued that the trouble started back during the “Powder Alarm,” and I may analyze that part of Brown’s letter sometime. For now, I’m confining myself to what happened on 17 September and afterward.)

Brown refused to sell rum to a British soldier that Saturday afternoon. The redcoat swore at him and, Brown said, “attempted to strike me with a large club.” Brown ran to the army camp to complain. He was told to speak to Lt. Col. George Maddison. Then came the Sabbath, and Brown finally met Maddison on Monday.

“Col. Maddison…received me with great politeness,” Brown stated. The soldier was already on trial for “getting drunk,” so the colonel added Brown’s accusation as another charge and asked him to return for the trial the next day.

On the morning of Tuesday, 20 September, Brown came back to the camp with two witnesses, William Shattuck and Nathaniel Barber, Jr. The proceeding didn’t go well for the locals. The officers trying the case believed they were rebels and the soldiers were justified in calling them that or worse. One officer

ask’d Mr. Barber whether there was not a man in town called Major Barber—

yes sir, replied Mr. Barber and he is my father——

The officer then said, that Major Barber was declared rebel, and told the son that he was doubtless tainted with the same principles, and therefore unworthy to be admitted as evidence against a soldier;

to which Mr. Barber replied that his father was an honest man, but be that as it might, he thought it extremely hard to be censur’d for his father’s conduct;

A very honest man indeed! return’d the officer

Shattuck and Barber also described the presiding officer reprimanding Brown this way:

how dare you—you rascal! who are a rebel—have the impudence to come here to complain of a soldier, and bring for evidence the son of a declared rebel.

Something appeared to have happened between Monday morning, when Lt. Col. Maddison was polite to Brown and took his accusation seriously, and Tuesday morning, when officers of the same regiment lambasted Brown and Barber as lying rebels.

In between those two mornings, the Boston Evening-Post printed the item listing “Major Nathaniel Barber” among the leaders of rebellion in Boston. And the next day, army officers clearly knew his name.

TOMORROW: Nathaniel Barber to the end.

“All the marks of the Whig propaganda department”?

The newspaper item I quoted yesterday, listing fifteen Whigs as Boston’s chief troublemakers and adding the surnames of three printers in a postscript, tends to be quoted in books and articles focused on those individuals.

That letter or “handbill,” various authors have said, is evidence of the real threats faced by [take your pick] Samuel Adams, Dr. Thomas Young, William Cooper, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper, Benjamin Edes, Isaiah Thomas, and even Dorothy Quincy, John Hancock’s fiancée.

One anomalous but influential author who mentioned the text was Clifford K. Shipton, compiler of Sibley’s Harvard Graduates in the mid-1900s. He didn’t like radicals, which meant he was less than sympathetic to New England’s Patriots.

In his profile of the Rev. Dr. Charles Chauncy (shown above), a staunch opponent of both bishops and New Lights and a strong supporter of the Boston Whigs, Shipton quoted a bit of the document and wrote:

The “handbill” has all the marks of the Whig propaganda department, and Charles Old Brick [i.e., Chauncy] may have put his own name into it.

Shipton offered no evidence that Chauncy ever engaged in this sort of subterfuge and provocation, however. Indeed, that same paragraph quoted the minister in August worrying that some towns would act with too much “precipitancy,” so he wanted the political atmosphere to calm down, not heat up.

I think stronger evidence that this letter was a hoax is that the Boston Whigs made so little of it. As I said yesterday, I found only one mention in the local press, in the Fleet brothers’ Boston Evening-Post after the text had appeared in New York. (Of course, if anyone finds an earlier Boston printing that I missed, then I’d have to rethink this whole line of thought.)

Benjamin Edes and John Gill didn’t complain about the threat in their Boston Gazette, nor did Isaiah Thomas in his Massachusetts Spy—and they were the printers the letter called “trumpeters of sedition” (an old term). Newspapers in Hartford, Salem, New London, and Portsmouth picked up the item, to be sure, but those printers didn’t have first-hand knowledge of what was really going on in Boston.

Perhaps, we might consider, those Boston printers were scared and didn’t want to give the letter more publicity. But there’s also nothing about the threats in the private minutes of the Boston selectmen, even as they complained to Gen. Thomas Gage about other things that month. There’s nothing in John Andrews’s gossipy letters. That pattern leads me to think that the Boston Whigs didn’t believe that this message was a real threat.

Thinking about where the text came from and why, I see four possibilities.

1) A Boston Loyalist really did throw this letter into the army camps to direct military attention to specific Whig leaders and printers. Charles W. Akers takes this position in his biography of Samuel Cooper, The Divine Politician. In that case, we must ask how the text leaked out, and why Boston leaders showed so little reaction to it.

2) A Boston Whig wrote the letter, tossed it into the camps, and made sure it got into the press in order to inflame public opinion. Why, then, did it not appear first in any Boston newspapers? How come so few Whigs trumpeted it? (Akers further argues that no one who was truly allied with Chauncy and Cooper would have had the effrontery to suggest they were involved in worldly politics, even though everyone knew they were.)

3) Someone in Boston created the letter and sent it to New York as authentic. It appeared in James Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer below an extract of a private letter from Boston, and it wasn’t credited to any Boston newspaper like items that followed. If this was the case, was the person who created the fake letter a Whig or a Loyalist?

4) Rivington created the letter himself. He was already speaking up for Crown authority, and Whigs already accused him of creating fake news. Later in the war he certainly did that, either as satire or propaganda. Was this an early example?

The item appeared in the New-York Gazetteer as army regiments were moving from that city to Boston, a process that Gen. Gage sped up after the “Powder Alarm” of 2 September. The letter’s intended audience might therefore have been not “the Officers and Soldiers of his Majesty’s Troops at Boston” but those on their way.

TOMORROW: Naming names.

“It is just that they should be the first victims”

September 1774 was a very busy time around Boston. On the first day of the month, Gen. Thomas Gage’s troops seized gunpowder from Middlesex County.

The next day, thousands of militia men streamed into Cambridge and demanded all royal officials, up to Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver, resign or apologize.

Relations deteriorated from there.

In The Road to Concord, I wrote about one critical development of that month, what I call an “arms race” to secure every artillery piece the Patriot leaders or royal army could get their hands on in and around Boston.

The conflict was heating up on other levels, too. Jurors were refusing the serve. Eastern Massachusetts was catching up to the west on county conventions. Towns held meetings without the governor’s approval to send delegates to the official Massachusetts General Court or unofficial Provincial Congress, whichever came first.

On 8 September, James Rivington (shown above) printed in his New-York Gazetteer this item in a column headed “BOSTON.,” in among news that Boston papers had printed in the first week of the month:

The following is an authentic Copy of a Letter, which was thrown into both the Camps, on Monday Night last, directed, “To the Officers and Soldiers of his Majesty’s Troops at Boston:

It being more than probable that the King’s standard will soon be erected, from rebellion breaking out in this province, its proper that you soldiers, should be acquainted with the authors thereof, and of all the Misfortunes brought upon the province, the following is a list of them, viz.

Mess. Samuel Adams, James Bowdoin, Dr. Thomas Young, Dr. Benjamin Church, Capt. John Bradford, Josiah Quincey, Major Nathaniel Barber, William Mollineux, John Hancock, Wm. Cooper, Dr. [Charles] Chancy, Dr. [Samuel] Cooper, Thomas Cushing, Joseph Greenleaf, and William Denning.—

The friends of your King and Country, and of America, hope and expect it from you soldiers, the instant rebellion happens, that you will put the above persons immediately to the sword, destroy their houses, and plunder their effects; it is just that they should be the first victims to the mischiefs they have brought upon us.

A Friend to Great Britain and America.

N. B. Don’t forget those trumpeters of sedition, the printers [Benjamin] Edes and [John] Gill, and [Isaiah] Thomas.”

I presumed Rivington reprinted that letter from a Boston newspaper and went looking for its first appearance. But I can’t find it in any such paper from late August to early September. (When Hezekiah Niles reprinted this text in the mid-1800s, he credited “the Boston Gazette, 1774.” But again, I can’t find it there.)

In fact, on 19 September the Boston Evening-Post reprinted most of the text from New York, adding some typos and abbreviating several words, as you can read here in the Harbottle Dorr newspaper collection. If the letter had already appeared in the Boston press, why would the Fleet brothers find it newsworthy enough to reprint then?

TOMORROW: Questions of authenticity.

Sheffield and the State of Nature

In January 1773, the town meeting of Sheffield named a large committee “to take into consideration the grievances which Americans in general, and the inhabitants of this province in particular, labour under; and to make a draught of such proceedings as they think are necessary for this town, in these critical circumstances, to enter into.”

The head of that committee, and thus the person entrusted with the primary responsibility for drafting its report, was the lawyer Theodore Sedgewick, then still in his twenties.

Later accounts say the committee met at the house of John Ashley (1709–1802), a local militia colonel, judge, and town officeholder.

On 12 January, one week after receiving their charge, the committee presented a series of resolutions to the town meeting. The voters approved that document unanimously. A copy went to the town’s representative in the Massachusetts General Court. The text appeared in the 15 February Boston Evening-Post and other newspapers.

Most of those resolutions were a protest against Parliament taxing people in the colony to fund salaries for the royal governor, judges, and other appointed figures—taxes that the men of Massachusetts never voted on to pay officials they never voted on, either.

The town also complained about New York claiming land between the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers, an episode I hope to discuss later.

But the eventually most famous of the Sheffield resolutions was the first, laying out the philosophical basis for the complaints that followed:

Resolved, That Mankind in a State of Nature are equal, free and independent of each other, and have a Right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their Lives, their Liberty and Property.

When the men in Ashley’s house discussed their draft, they surely thought of that as a truism that strengthened their tax protest, with no broader implications.

However, Ashley was also a slaveholder.

TOMORROW: A new statue in Sheffield.

“Playing with a loaded Gun”

In the same 14 Dec 1772 issue of the Fleet brothers’ Boston Evening-Post that I mentioned yesterday, just above the rumors about Rhode Island, were two stories of firearms deaths.

Longtime Boston 1775 readers might remember when we discussed the pseudo-historian David Barton’s offhand claim that there were almost no firearms accidents in the Founding era. We found a lot.

Here are two more:

We hear from Springfield, that two Lads about 10 Years of Age, playing with a loaded Gun, one of them shot the other in the Groin, and mortally wounded him, so that he died within two Hours after.

The identical item had appeared in the Boston News-Letter on 10 December, pushing back the date of the event a few days. I looked in Springfield’s vital records for a death that matched this report and didn’t find one. It’s possible that the news came from Springfield but the boys lived in a nearby town. In any case, kids, don’t play with guns.

The Fleets went on to print:

We hear from East Hampton, on Long Island, that on Monday the 30th of November, being Training Day there, as the Company were discharging their Muskets, in order to break up, a young Man, named Osborne, thinking to make a louder Explosion than the rest, spat into the Muzzle of his Gun, & struck the Breech against the Ground, when she went off, and the whole Charge enter’d at his left Eye, and blow’d his Brains out; he expir’d in a few Minutes after.

Some internet research brought up not only the the name of this militiaman but his grave, shown above.

East Hampton, New York’s vital records state that on 30 Nov 1772 “Jedediah Osborn, Junr., was shot to Death.” The gravestone reads, per an issue of the New England Historic and Genealogical Register:

This Monument Erected
by Col. Gardner, Capt.
Mulford Lieut. Dayton &
their Soldiers, is in
Memory of Jedediah
Osborn, who was Kill’d
by the Discharge of his
Gun, Novr. 30th. 1772 in
the 21st. Year of his Age.
How sudden was my Death
Life is but fleeting Breath

The colonel was probably Thomas Gardiner. There were too many Mulfords and Daytons active in the Long Island militia in 1776, a year for which records are published, for me to name the other officers.

Whoever the officers were, it’s clear that they felt very bad seeing Jedediah kill himself, evidently just hoping for some fun. Some of those other men might also have been competing to make the loudest noise. This was the sort of militia training hijinks that Timothy Pickering warned about.

Also, though the story of Osborn’s death made the newspapers in neighboring states, the embarrassing circumstances were kept out of the official record and not carved in stone. Local tradition now says he was “a Revolutionary War soldier killed by friendly fire.” This may be the first time the newspaper item and gravestone are tied back together.

(The image of the Osborn gravestone above comes from B.S.A. Troop 298 via Find a Grave.)

“The printed Narratives of the late horred Massacre”

This week I watched an online talk by Robert Darnton about his new book Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment. He described various stratagems printers and booksellers used to get around two stifling forces in ancien régime France: censorship by the government and monopoly by Paris’s licensed printers and booksellers. 

That topic made me think of another event from 1770 Boston in that I didn’t mention on its Sestercentennial anniversary, in part because it was kept low-key to avoid attracting too much attention.

Compared to France, the late-1700s British Empire had very free publishing laws. But in March 1770 the Boston town meeting imposed a specific bookselling ban: it commissioned Benjamin Edes and John Gill and the Fleet brothers to print the Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, but forbade them from selling copies locally.

The town itself dispatched copies of that report to Britain. William Molineux sent a copy to Robert Treat Paine to help him prepare for the trials. Copies were shipped to other colonial ports. But the Boston Whigs wanted to avoid any complaints that the report had prejudiced the Suffolk County jury pool against the Boston Massacre defendants, so they banned local sales.

After copies of the Short Narrative reached London, Whiggish printers there produced their own editions to satisfy public interest. William Bingley approximated the Boston publication’s layout. Edward and Charles Dilly, working with John Almon, commissioned a copy of the engraved image of the shooting made by Henry Pelham and Paul Revere and added that as a frontispiece, as shown above.

By July 1770, copies of those British editions had arrived back in Boston, along with evidence of other responses to the Massacre in London, such as Capt. Thomas Preston’s “Case,” the Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance, and Andrew Oliver’s description of the actions of Massachusetts Council. Those got most of the attention from top local Whigs, but the printers had their own interest.

At a 10 July town meeting, the Short Narrative’s original printers noted that, since the London edition was circulating, the jury pool was already tainted with no local getting any benefit. The town considered “A Motion made that the printed Narratives of the late horred Massacre, which had been retained by order of the Town in the hands of the Committee; may now be sold by the Printers.”

Town clerk William Cooper’s notes say it “Passed in the Narrative”—a slip of the pen for “Negative.” In other words, the printers had to keep sitting on their costly investment in paper and labor.

TOMORROW: Getting to market anyway.

Assault on a “young lad” in Marlborough

Now to get back to events in Marlborough in July 1770.

Back here I quoted a letter published in the Boston Gazette on 30 July 1770, describing an effigy of local merchant Henry Barnes on horseback. And here I quoted the part of that article discussing the threatening letter Barnes received in the middle of the month.

I now know that letter was first published in the Fleet brothers’ 23 July Boston Evening-Post, 250 years ago today.

That anonymous correspondent didn’t end with comparing Barnes to Don Quixote. He (or she) went on to this alarming tale, naming names all the way:

proclamation is made of liquor to be given away to all that were for Barns, whereupon there assembled on the 17th of july current a great number———Capt. Nathan Brigham jun’r, Solomon Newton and Joshua Newton all of Southboro’, Joseph Parker, John Richards, Alexander Boyd, Luke How, Thomas Swann, (all Barn’s workmen) John Gat Brigham, Joshua Lamb, Simon How, Peter Wood, Joel Barnard, Joseph Lewis, Solomon Brigham and Moses Barns, and others.

In the evening they would some of them sally out with clubs &c. and collar those that passed by in the street. A young lad in the neighbourhood had beat a drum that evening, as he had sundry evenings before, in order to learn to drum, and there came to him John Richards, and inticed him to go with him, promising no harm should befall him, & after he had got him some way from home he was assaulted by Alex. Boyd, Joseph Hale and John Gat Brigham.—

One struck him with his fist,——but two others made several passes at his throat with edged weapons, and stab’d him in his shoulder thro’ his shirt; he then cried out murder and said they had stab’d him; whereupon others came running to his relief from being murdered outright on the spot; he pleaded with them to let him go home: but Hale and Brigham would not let him and hall’d him along by Barn’s to Simon How’s, the man that had kept open doors & dealt out the liquor that evening.

Mr. How expressed himself very sorry and said he tho’t they had carried matters a little too far.—Two of them said they would detain him and lick him to death if he would not promise not to prosecute them, and Thomas Swann said he would pay the fine. Some of their company not being much liquor’d procured his liberty to go home.

The young lad is like to recover, though his life has been in imminent danger. And his father is prosecuting the affair, and it is hoped that the civil authority will prevent the repetition of such a horrid Tragedy as that of the 5th of March in Boston.

The Boston Gazette typesetters wrote of the Massacre as a “Tradegy.”

By the time Edes and Gill had published that letter, there was another, contradictory report on its way to them.

TOMORROW: “an infamous, scandalous libel.”

“Cutting a plate of the late Murder”

On 26 Mar 1770, the Boston Gazette ran this advertisment:

To be Sold by EDES and GILL
(Price Eight Pence Lawful Money)
A PRINT containing a Representation
of the late horrid Massacre in King-Street.

The same ad appeared that evening in the Fleet brothers’ Boston Evening-Post.

That picture of the Boston Massacre was made by Paul Revere. It showed a British army officer ordering his soldiers all to shoot into a recoiling crowd. Men lay dead on the ground, their wounds blood red in the painted versions. The Customs House behind the soldiers was labeled “Butchers Hall.”

Ironically, this picture went on sale on the same day the Boston town meeting voted not to distribute the Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre lest that sway potential jurors’ minds.

This image is probably Revere’s most famous production, but it’s not at all typical of his artwork. He rarely came up with such a complex composition with people and buildings lined up in careful perspective. So how had he managed that this time?

The Boston Gazette advertisement caught the attention of twenty-one-year-old Henry Pelham, half-brother of the painter John Singleton Copley and an aspiring artist himself. On Thursday, 29 March, 250 years ago today, Pelham addressed an angry note to Revere:

Sir,

When I heard that you were cutting a plate of the late Murder, I thought it impossible, as I knew you was not capable of doing it unless you coppied it from mine and as I thought I had entrusted it in the hands of a person who had more regard to the dictates of Honour and Justice than to take the undue advantage you have done of the confidence and Trust I reposed in you.

But I find I was mistaken, and after being at the great Trouble and Expence of making a design paying for paper, printing &c, find myself in the most ungenerous Manner deprived, not only of any proposed Advantage, but even of the expence I have been at, as truly as if you had plundered me on the highway.

If you are insensible of the Dishonour you have brought on yourself by this Act, the World will not be so. However, I leave you to reflect upon and consider of one of the most dishonorable Actions you could well be guilty of.

H. Pelham.

P S. I send by the Bearer the Prints I borrowed of you. My Mother desired you would send the hinges and part of the press, that you had from her.

Pelham had been working on his own engraving of the Massacre, headlined “The Fruits of Arbitrary Power.” It reflected the same anger at the shooting that his older half-brother showed on 6 March when he went to the town meeting to complain about a soldier’s threat.

Revere’s print was almost identical to Pelham’s. The small differences included slightly wonkier perspective, the removal of a church spire, and that “Butchers Hall” sign.

Pelham had the decorative painter Daniel Rea, Jr., (1743-1803) printing 575 copies of his engraving. Along with “12 Quire of Paper,” that left the young artist owing Rea £5.9s.

There was no copyright law in colonial America. If an engraver went to all the trouble to carve a copy of someone else’s design, he could sell those prints. Pelham couldn’t object to Revere copying one of his published prints, but he obviously thought the silversmith had taken advantage of a drawing or early proof he’d cordially shared and then beaten him to market.

Revere and his Whig colleagues appear to have mollified the young artist. On Monday, 2 April, a new ad appeared in the Boston Gazette:

To be Sold by EDES and GILL,
and T. and J. Fleet,
(Price Eight Pence)
The Fruits of Arbitrary Power,
an Original Print, representing the last horrid Massacre in King Street, taken from the Spot.

A similar ad appeared in the Boston Evening-Post. The next week’s Gazette advertised Pelham’s print again. There was no second ad for Revere’s print. The town’s most radical printers thus helped Pelham earn back his investment. Revere’s accounts showed he continued to do business with the Copley and Pelham family over the next few years.

Curiously, there are more copies of Revere’s Massacre in collections today than Pelham’s. Did Revere make a lot more than 575 copies? Did that one-week edge in the market bring much wider distribution? Or did Revere’s fame in the late 1800s mean more people preserved copies of the print with his name?

Designing this image was the height of Henry Pelham’s Whiggism. His family was Anglican to begin with, which made him more apt to side with the royal government. Then Copley married a daughter of tea importer Richard Clarke, beleaguered in the weeks leading up to the Tea Party.

By the outbreak of the war in 1775, Pelham was so angry and suspicious about the Patriot cause that he feared a mob would attack another half-brother, Charles Pelham, in Newton. Henry Pelham left Boston with the British army in 1776 and settled in Ireland.

A Voice against “the sanguinary vampyres”

As I wrote yesterday, on 1 Apr 1765 the Boston Evening-Post ran a front-page article about vampires cribbed from an account of traveling in Germany published twenty years before. The Fleet brothers could have picked up that item from the Connecticut Courant.

That article prompted a stern response, as long as the original article, in the form of a letter “To the Publishers of the Boston Evening-Post.” So far as I know, this is the only writing about vampires to come out of colonial New England, or all of colonial America.

The letter started with the motto “Si populus vult decepi decipiatur” (If people are willing to be deceived, let them be deceived). After discussing the news business and how page-filling “speculation” can produce “useful knowledge” or “benevolent sentiments,” the letter gets to the point in paragraph 4:

…what an injudicious choice of speculation is that publish’d in the Boston Evening-Post of the 1st instant? Can any person capable of exercising his reason, once imagine, that the surprising account of those spectres called Vampyres, has any possible tendency to promote the forementioned very worthy purposes? nay, is it not rather plainly calculated, to frighten old women and children, to amuse the ignorant and superstitious, and the promote deism and infidelity in the world? Most certainly, neither the publishers themselves, nor any sober man and good christian, can believe there is one word of truth, in all that long, surprising, and terrific account exhibited in the aforesaid paper.

Besides, how ridiculous as well as impious must it be, to suppose that the Supreme Being would commit the keys of death to infernal spirits and demons, and suffer them to drag dead bodies of men from their graves, and make them instruments to destroy the living?

For my own part, I can as soon give credence to the most fabulous stories of witches and spectres, of demons and goblins stalking by moon-light; or believe the whole phenomena of the Salem witchcraft; the incubusses, the succubusses, the preternatural teats; with all the trumpery and wonders of the invisible world: Or the scene of witchcraft open’d at Woodstock, a few years ago, when 132 stones of different sizes, were said to be thrown into a room (close shut up) by the agency of infernal spirits;——I say, I can as soon give credit to all this, as to the surprising account of the sanguinary vampyres.

Of course all the Boston newspaper’s readers knew about the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692-93, which had become a notorious embarrassment for the New England Puritan leadership.

The “Woodstock” scene probably meant a legend from Woodstock, England, in 1649. In 1747 the British Magazine published a “Genuine History of the Good Devil of Woodstock,” which purported to debunk the myth. (H. A. Evans revealed that article itself to be a fraud in Notes and Queries in 1903.) Thus, for a well-read Bostonian in 1765, both the Woodstock and Salem stories were delusions and frauds, not real supernatural mysteries.

The letter thus declared the supernatural stories from central Europe about vampires were ridiculous on their face and conflicted with the supernatural system most people in Boston already shared.

But the writer didn’t leave it there. He (or she) dug into the original article’s scriptural references:

The remarks upon these incredible stories, may not be concluded without observing, that they are wickedly and profanely pretended to be supported and confirmed by sundry texts of sacred scripture: which, the the reader will be at pains to examine, he will find no more to the purpose, than the story of the witch of Endor, or that of Balaam’s Ass;—or in the account of the tour which the devil made on the unenlightened part of the globe. . . .

If the first broachers of the story under consideration, instead of prostituting those texts of cannonical scripture, to support their fiction, they refer’d their readers to a story in the apocrypha, it had been nearer the point, and something more to their purpose. The story may be read by the curious, in the 6th 7th and 8th chapters of the book of Tobit.

In those chapters an angel tells Tobias, “Touching the heart and the liver [of a fish], if a devil or an evil spirit trouble any, we must make a smoke thereof before the man or the woman, and the party shall be no more vexed.“ By doing so, Tobias survives a night with a young woman who had been promised to “seven men,” but they “all died in the marriage chamber.” That story wasn’t precisely like the vampire myth but had unmistakable similarities.

So what was the point of that final paragraph? One interpretation might be that vampire stories were as false as scripture that good Protestants had rejected, but the letter writer didn’t drive home that point. Another is that those vampire stories actually had some support in ancient religious literature, but that went against the message of the rest of the essay. I suspect that the letter writer just couldn’t resist showing off his (or her) scholarly knowledge of the Bible.

COMING UP: After the war.

Vampire Reports in Colonial American Newspapers

The March 1732 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine in London carried this news in its Foreign Advices section: “From Medreyga in Hungary, That certain dead Bodies called Vampyres, had kill’d several Persons by sucking out all their Blood.”

The ensuing paragraph described a man named Arnold Paul who had felt himself tormented by vampires, then after his death was deemed to have become a vampire himself.

Having found the man’s body too well preserved in the grave, his neighbors, “according to Custom, drove a Stake thro’ his Heart; at which he gave a horrid Groan. They burnt his Body to Ashes, and threw them into his Grave.” And to be safe, the people “served several other dead Bodies in the same manner.”

That article was widely reprinted and discussed in Europe. I’ve found only two American periodicals that picked it up, however: the Weekly Rehearsal of Boston on 5 June 1732 and the American Weekly Mercury in Philadelphia on 15 June 1732. Both stories ran on page 2, and no follow-up discussions appeared on this side of the Atlantic.

In October 1736 the French magazine Mercure Historique et Politique published a vampire report from Moldavia in eastern Europe. That news was translated into English within months, but it took another year before the New-England Weekly Journal of 14 Mar 1738 reprinted the tale. That two-page periodical promised “the Most Remarkable Occurrences Foreign and Domestick,” and its printers ran this story at the top of page 1.

In this incident, after several deaths a village came to suspect a vampire was lurking nearby. Imperial authorities exhumed several bodies and found one unusually well preserved. They “drove a Stake through his Heart, which done, a great Fire was kindled, and the Carcase reduced to Ashes.” Again, there was no follow-up in the Boston press.

On 21 Jan 1765, the Connecticut Courant of Hartford published a front-page article headed “The surprizing Account of those Spectres called VAMPYRES.” That newspaper stated:

These Vampyres are supposed to be the bodies of deceased persons animated by evil spirits, which come out of their graves in the night-time, suck the blood of many of the living, and thereby destroy them. Such a notion will probably, be look’d upon as fabulous: but it is related and maintained by authors of great authority.

The item then quoted “M. J. Henr Zopfius” as saying that a stake through the heart and a bonfire could solve the problem. The article noted a number of examples from 1693 through 1738 before closing with citations of Biblical verses.

That whole passage came right from The Travels of three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh, being the grand Tour of Germany, in the Year 1734. It was inspired by a conversation those three travelers had in Laubach, Hesse, followed by some library research. This anonymous text was first published in the fourth volume of The Harleian Miscellany, a collection of manuscripts, pamphlets, and tracts from the Earl of Oxford’s library edited by Dr. Samuel Johnson and published in 1745.

In other words, this report wasn’t timely, useful information. Printer Thomas Green used a sensational old story to attract eyeballs. The next item in that issue of the Courant was “A comical MIRACLE” about a dug-up skull that fooled some French Catholics.

I’ve found only one American newspaper picking up the “surprizing Account” from the Connecticut Courant (or a common source). That was the 1 Apr 1765 Boston Evening-Post, and that date might be significant. Again, the Fleet brothers chose to run the as the first item in the issue. But this publication attracted a quick pushback.

TOMORROW: Wonders of the invisible world indeed.

How Newspapers Covered the Fight at the Clarke House

The fight at the Clarke house on School Street on the night of 17 Nov 1773 offers a good test case of colonial Boston’s highly politicized press.

The next morning, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, a Whig newspaper, put all the blame for the violence on the Clarkes:

Last evening a number of people assembled before the house of Richard Clarke, Esq; one of the Tea Commissioners, and huzzaed, upon which a musket was fired from his house among the populace, which so enraged them that they broke his windows, &c.

In contrast, Richard Draper’s Boston News-Letter, friendly to the royal government, blamed the crowd and said nothing about a gunshot:

Last Evening a Number of Persons assembled in School-Street, they broke the Windows and did other considerable Damage by throwing large Stones into the House of the late Middlecot Cook, Esq; near King’s Chappel, now belonging to Dr. Saltonstall of Haverhill, and occupied by Richard Clarke, Esq;

Eight days later, the News-Letter published a much longer account, quoted here. That one did mention the pistol shot, but as a response to the violent crowd and in the context of detail about damage to the house. That report clearly came from someone inside the house.

Three newspapers came out on Monday, 22 November. I already quoted the emotional account from the Clarke family that appeared in Mills and Hicks’s Boston Post-Boy.

The Fleet brothers’ Boston Evening-Post, which tried to stick to the political center in the Whig town, stated:

Last Wednesday Evening a number of People assembled before the House of Richard Clarke, Esq; in School-Street, and being irritated by a Musket or Pistol being fired at them out of the House, they broke the Windows, and did other Damage.

And finally there was the Boston Gazette. Its printers, Benjamin Edes and John Gill, worked closely with the town’s government and the radical Whigs. The 22 November Boston Gazette report on the fight at the Clarkes was:

Nothing.

Edes and Gill devoted almost all their space for local news to publishing about the town meetings against the tea that the consignees declined to attend. They wanted to portray the town as united, orderly, and not given to violence.

Only after the Boston News-Letter published its report from inside the Clarke house did the Boston Gazette mention that fight. In the 29 November issue the Whig paper ran one short paragraph at the bottom of a page:

We have not Room this Week to publish the Answer to an Account inserted in Draper’s last Paper respecting the Transactions at Mr. Clarke’s the 17th Instant [i.e., this month]; but we can assure our Readers from a Gentleman of Veracity who was a Spectator, That that Account was false in almost every Sentence, and that Mr. Draper himself knew it to be so.

The next issue of the Gazette contained no such “Answer.” Like other cries of “fake news” presented without any actual evidence of misreporting, this claim couldn’t convince anyone whose mind wasn’t already made up.

Gershom Spear “to all Appearance dead”

Last week I mentioned in passing the marriage of Gershom Spear (1755-1816) to Elizabeth Bradlee. The bridegroom almost didn’t make it. On 21 Nov 1762, young Gershom drowned in Boston harbor.

As Thomas and John Fleet’s Boston Evening-Post reported the next day:

Last Evening a Boy about 8 Years old, Son to Mr. Joseph Spear, fell from a Wharf near the South Battery, and was accidentally discovered under the Water ’tis tho’t about a Quarter of an Hour after he fell in; he was taken up motionless and to all Appearance dead…

Fortunately, earlier that month, on 1 November, the Evening-Post had reprinted an extract of a letter about drowning that had appeared in the London press the previous year.

That letter had been sent from Oporto, or the Portuguese port of Porto, by a sea captain named John Bell, master of the British ship Elizabeth. The letter was also reprinted in the 16 Apr 1762 New-Hampshire Gazette, and it said:

Since I have been here, a Dutchman fell into the River, and was taken up from the bottom about three quarters of an hour afterwards; he was carried on board the ship he belong’d to, and orders were actually given for sewing him up in a hamock, in order to bury him.

The British vice consul (Mr. Gabriel Hervey) who is a very humane man, hearing of the affair, took a boat, went on board, laid the fellow by the fire side, and kept rubbing him with common salt till life returned, and the man is now hearty and well.

Mr. Hervey has told me, he has known a dog kept under water two hours, and recovered by being covered with salt; and his lady told me she had recovered a cat.

Evidently the memory of that news article gave little Gershom’s father an idea.

TOMORROW: Can this child be saved?

[The engraving above was made by Robert Pollard in 1787 after a painting by Robert Smirke, and comes courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.]

“Soon after the fire broke out, he caused his wind to blow”

Given Boston’s religious heritage, the Great Fire of 1760 naturally caused people to ask what God meant by it.

On 23 March, the Sunday after the fire, the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew preached about the calamity at the West Meetinghouse. That sermon said the destruction must be the result of divine will:

When this fire broke out, and for some time before, it was almost calm. And had it continued so, the fire might probably have been extinguished in a short time, before it had done much damage; considering the remarkable resolution and dexterity of many people amongst us on such occasions.

But it seems that God, who had spared us before beyond our hopes, was now determined to let loose his wrath upon us; to “rebuke us in his anger, and chasten us in his hot displeasure [a riff on Psalm 38:1].” In order to the accomplishing of which design, soon after the fire broke out, he caused his wind to blow; and suddenly raised it to such a height, that all endeavors to put a stop to the raging flames, were ineffectual: though there seems to have been no want, either of any pains or prudence, which could be expected at such a time.

The Lord had purposed, and who should disannul it? His hand was stretched out, and who should turn it back [Isaiah 14:27].[”] “When he giveth quietness, who then can make trouble? And when he hideth his face, who then can behold him? Whether it be done against a nation, or against a man only [Job 34:29].”

It had been a dry season for some time; unusually so for the time of the year. The houses, and other things were as fuel prepared for the fire to feed on: and the flames were suddenly spread, and propagated to distant places. So that, in the space of a few hours, the fire swept all before it in the direction of the wind; spreading wider and wider from the place where it began, till it reached the water. Nor did it stop even there, without the destruction of the wharfs, with several vessels lying at them, and the imminent danger of many others.

We may now, with sufficient propriety, adopt the words of the psalmist, and apply them to our own calamitous circumstances, “Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolation he hath made in the earth. [Psalm 46:8]” So melancholy a scene, occasioned by fire, was, to be sure, never beheld before in America; at least not in the British dominions. And when I add, God grant that the like may never be beheld again, I am sure you will all say, Amen!

In short, this must needs be considered, not only as a very great, but public calamity. It will be many years before this town, long burdened with so great, not to say, disproportionate, a share of the public expenses, will recover itself from the terrible blow. Nor will this metropolis only be affected and prejudiced hereby. The whole province will feel it. For such are the dependencies and connections in civil society, regularly constituted.

At the same time, Mayhew explicitly refrained from casting blame on any particular sinners in Boston and warned his listeners against doing the same. He reminded his congregation of what he said were divine blessings, such as the lack of fatalities and how the war was going so well.

Mayhew’s sermon was quickly printed by Richard Draper, Edes and Gill, and the Fleet brothers together. That pamphlet included footnotes noting that the Massachusetts General Court had already voted to draw “about two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds sterling…out of the public treasury” for disaster relief, and “his Excellency the Governor [was] desired to send briefs throughout the province, recommending a general contribution for the unhappy sufferers.”

Further footnotes made an explicit appeal for charity:

About a thousand pounds lawful money was collected in the several religious assemblies in the town, for the relief of the sufferers by the late fire near Oliver’s dock: A large sum, considering the impoverish’d and declining state of the town, and the greatness of the public taxes. And tho’ the dispo|sition of the people be still the same, and the present occasion much greater, and more urgent than the former; yet it will naturally be remember’d that our ability is now less than it was then. . . .

It is to be hoped therefore, that our friends and brethren who live in the country, where their situation secures them so effectually against calamities of this nature, will seriously consider the present distressed condition of the town and shew their christian benevolence on this occasion agreeably to the Brief which his Excellency the Governor has issued out.

Later in the 1760s, much the same argument about Boston’s situation—that people were already generous, that the economy was declining, that the taxes were too high—would resurface in response to Parliament’s new taxes.

TOMORROW: Another religious response.

Sufferers from the Great Boston Fire of 1760

The scope of the Boston fire of 20 Mar 1760 really comes out in the list of victims that the newspapers published in the following week.

The list was actually a guess, based on November 1759 property assessment records. The printers acknowledged that “Several Widows and a few others are probably omitted.” And of course the names are the heads of household, not the relatives, servants, and boarders also affected.

In his later account the young printer John Boyle added, “The House of Col. Joseph Ingersol catch’d on Fire, but being Brick it was preserved. Here the Flames ended.” Ingersoll’s house was also the Bunch of Grapes tavern.

Other notices in the newspapers testify to the disruption the fire caused throughout the town.

It is desired by the Inhabitants of the Town, That those who live in the Neighbourhood where the late Fire was, would collect and send to the Town-House, all the Buckets & Bags that belong to any Society, where a Person will receive them for the respective Owners.

The town rewarded the firefighting society which was the first on the scene of a fire, and at the end of the month the selectmen gave that award to the “Master of the Marlborough Engine.”

All Persons who have had any Goods or Household Furniture deposited with them during the late Fire, and are at a Loss to whom to return them, are desired either to send them to Faneuil-Hall immediately, or give Information of the same to the Person who will attend there for that Purpose, and where proper Care will be taken that the right Owners shall have them.

The printers were looking for their own customers:

As several Customers to the Boston Evening-Post are burnt out by the late terrible fire, and the publishers not knowing what part of the town they are in, it is desired they would send for their papers

Even before that newspaper was published on 24 March, some Bostonians were looking accusingly at people living in the house where the fire started—the Sign of the Brazen Head.

COMING UP: Finger-pointing, engraving, and what this all meant for The Road to Concord.