“They Stole many things & plunder’d my Store”

John Rowe reported that Monday, 11 Mar 1776, brought “Gloomy heavy Weather,” and his mood wasn’t any better.

The day before, as quoted yesterday, Gen. William Howe issued a proclamation requiring everyone with “Linnen and Woolen Goods” to turn them over to the evacuating army lest they fall into Continental hands.

That proclamation promised that the New York merchant Crean Brush (shown here) “will give a Certificate of the Delivery, and will oblige himself to return them to the Owners.” But if people didn’t comply, they risked being treated as rebel sympathizers.

Rowe appears to have been surprised that this proclamation applied to him, too. His 11 March diary entry says:

This morning I Rose very Early and very Luckily went to my Warehouse

when I Came there I found Mr. Crian Brush with an Order & party from the Genl. who were just going to Break Open the Warehouse which I prevented by Sending for the Keys & Opening the Doors—

They took from Mee to the Value of Twenty Two hundred & Sixty Pounds Sterling According to the best Calculation I Could make in Linnens Checks Cloths & Woollens—

This Party behaved very Insolently & with Great Rapacity & I am very well Convinc’d exceeding their orders to a Great Degree They Stole many things & plunder’d my Store. Words cannot Describe it

This Party consisted of Mr. Blasswitch who was one of the Canceaux people [i.e., an officer on H.M.S. Canceaux] Mr. Brush the Provost Mr. [William] Cunningham A Refugee Mr. [James or Peter] Welch The Provost Deputy—A Man nam’d [William] Hill & abo. fifteen Soldiers—with others—

I Remained all Day in the store but Could not hinder their Destruction of my Goods This day I Got a piece of Bread & one Draft of Flip

I Spent the Evening at home with Mr. [Samuel] Parker Rich’d Green Mr. [Jonathan] Warner of Portsmouth who assisted Mee very much with Mrs. Rowe & Jack Rowe

They are making the Utmost Speed to get away & carrying Ammunition Cannon & every thing they Can away taking all things they meet with never asking who is Owner or whose Property making havock in Every house & Destruction of All kinds of Furniture—

There never was Such Destruction & Outrage committed any day before this Many other People have suffer’d the Same Fate as Mee— Particularly—
Mr. Saml. Austin Mr. John Scolly Capt. [Samuel] Partridge Capt. [Samuel] Dashwood Mr. Cyrus Baldwin The Widow [Mary] Newman

In May 1776, Austin, Scollay, Partridge, Dashwood, and Rowe petitioned the Continental Congress to speak up for them about their confiscated goods. But there was a war on.

Nine years later, in 1785, Rowe, Partridge, Dashwood, and Austin sought help from Gov. James Bowdoin and American minister John Adams in gaining redress from Britain. (I don’t know why Scollay dropped out; he was still alive at the time.)

Responding to a similar claim from Dr. Thomas Bulfinch, Adams wrote back on 13 Oct 1786:

I have not yet presented any of these Claims at Court, because there is not even a Possibility of their being regarded— . . . I frankly own I do not think, that the Dignity or the faith of the United States ought ever to have been compromised in these Matters—

If those Boston merchants had left with the British military, they might have regained their property after landing in Halifax. But they did, after all, show themselves to be rebel sympathizers.

TOMORROW: A receipt, and more disorder.

New York’s Sons of Liberty at the Fraunces Tavern

Today the Fraunces Tavern Museum in New York City opens its new exhibition, “Fear & Force: New York City’s Sons of Liberty.” This display will remain on view in the Mesick Gallery for the next two years.

The museum’s announcement says:

On display in the Museum’s largest gallery, the exhibition will immerse visitors in New York City in the late 18th century, when the Sons of Liberty first began to make a name for themselves as an organized group who opposed British rule through violent resistance prior to the outbreak of the American Revolution.

The exhibition will take visitors through a timeline that chronicles key players and stories behind some of the most dramatic events that ignited the spark of revolution in the 13 colonies, from the staging of New York’s very own “tea party,” to tarring and feathering Loyalists.

The New York Tea Party took place on 22 Apr 1774, four months after the famous Boston Tea Party and one month after the less famous second Boston Tea Party. But I can see why this site wants to highlight the New York event, and I’ll say more about it tomorrow.

As for “tarring and feathering Loyalists,” New Yorkers actually carried out that public punishment on Customs employees or informers before Bostonians did, though folks in some of the smaller ports along Massachusetts’s north shore had established the tradition even earlier.

New York’s Sons of Liberty definitely originated Liberty Poles. They showed their patriotism by flying a British flag—while also tussling with British soldiers quartered nearby. The soldiers resented what they probably saw as hypocrisy or effrontery, and that produced a series of brawls, attempts to fell the locals’ flagpole, and erections of even larger flagpoles. Because when it came to Liberty Poles, size mattered.

In March 1770 the Sons of Liberty John Lamb and William Cunningham reportedly bought land for New York’s biggest Liberty Pole yet. Five years later when the war broke out, Lamb became a Continental Army artillery officer while Cunningham became provost, or head of prisoners, for the British army. I’d love to know more about Cunningham’s career in New York before 1775. Will this exhibit have something to say?

Among the artifacts to be displayed in the Fraunces Tavern’s largest room are “an iron fence fragment from the tearing down of the King George III statue in Bowling Green Park” in 1776 after the reading of the Declaration of Independence. A few months later, the royal forces took the city, and the Sons of Liberty had to go into hiding for more than six years. Perhaps a future Fraunces Tavern Museum exhibit will look at the New York City as the center of Loyalism during most of the war.

William Cunningham Enters Stage Left

Boston 1775 isn’t the only website discussing William Cunningham this week. Lora Innes has introduced him into her historical romance comic, The Dreamer. One of the heroes of that story is Connecticut hero Nathan Hale, and his real encounter with Cunningham didn’t end well for him.

Fans responded to the debunking of Cunningham’s “Dying Confesssion” this way:

• Caera: “Please don’t tell me he got off after all the crap he put everyone though, to say nothing of our dearest Nathan!”
• Susan: “Wait he wasn’t hanged? WHY DID THE INTERNET LIE TO ME!!!!!!!!!!”
• David: “I smell a conspiracy here. SOMETHING kept the British authorities from doing the right thing and removing Cunningham from his position.”

And people say that modern audiences can’t get passionate about a story from the Revolutionary era.

There are now two paperback volumes of The Dreamer published, as well as several digital short stories at the comic’s webstore. And since it began as a webcomic, you can start reading the story from the beginning for free.

William Cunningham, Son of Liberty

Historians of British prison reform and genealogists seem to be doing a good job at filling in the details of William Cunningham’s life after he served as provost martial (or marshal) for the Crown forces throughout the war. Which leaves his life before the war as the big mystery.

The Loyalist judge Thomas Jones (1731-1792) used his exile in Britain in the 1780s to write a History of New York During the Revolutionary War. In it he called Cunningham “a Son of Liberty who had become disaffected.” That manuscript was published by the New-York Historical Society in 1879.

In the meantime, Henry B. Dawson’s Reminiscences of the City of New York (1855) also described Cunningham as a Son of Liberty before becoming a Crown supporter by 1775. In narrating the brawls between royal soldiers and New Yorkers over the Liberty Pole in early 1770, Ferdinand S. Bartram’s Retrographs (1888) said:

Two members of the Sons of Liberty, John Lamb and William Cunningham, the latter afterward known as the notorious Marshal Cunningham of the Revolution, were appointed to purchase a plot of land, which they selected, adjoining the common, where, upon the 6th [Mar 1770], the pole was raised in the presence of about four thousand spectators. It was of immense proportions, banded with iron hoops and braced with rods, imbedded in the earth between rocks, and secured with masonry. Thus was the fifth pole raised by the Liberty Boys.

Unfortunately, those books don’t cite any documentary sources for their statements about Cunningham.

Exactly five years after that fifth pole was erected, on 6 Mar 1775, Cunningham and a man named John Hill got into a fight with Patriots near Liberty Pole. The crowd roughed up both men badly. Newspapers published conflicting stories of what happened, depending on which side of the political divide they stood. The only thing clear was that Cunningham was now on the side of the Crown.

Indeed, the royal government was soon employing Cunningham, if it didn’t already. Authorities sent him to arrest the Patriot activist Isaac Sears the next month, and a crowd assaulted Cunningham again.

When the war broke out, Cunningham and Hill took off for Boston. Hill was eventually an assistant to Crean Brush, a Loyalist given a job by the military authorities. Cunningham became provost martial and held that position again in New York, Philadelphia during the winter of 1777-78, and New York until the end of the war. I’ve found a hint of romance between Hill’s daughter Mary and Cunningham’s son Ralph, but I’ll save that gossip for later.

I don’t know the historical sources in New York, and perhaps there’s more documentation of Cunningham’s life before the war. We do know that the 1792 “Dying Confession” ascribed to him is unreliable. But was he born in America or an immigrant (which seems more likely)? What caused him to join the Sons of Liberty in 1770 and to turn against them by 1775?

(The sketch above is Pierre Eugène du Simitière’s sketch of one of New York’s Liberty Poles in 1770, courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Did John Binns Meet Provost William Cunningham?

One of the mysteries of Provost William Cunningham’s career has been the description of him that John Binns (1772-1860) left in his memoirs, published in 1854.

During the Revolutionary War, Binns was still a lad—not to mention three thousand miles away in Ireland. As a young man, Binns was a radical journalist, part of the United Irishmen movement. In mid-1799 the British government confined him to the Gloucestershire jail at Littledean.

Binns later wrote:

I was received at the gate of the jail by the governor; that is the title bestowed upon the principal keeper of the prison. His name was Cunningham, a retired half-pay officer in the army of his Britannic Majesty. He was well known in Philadelphia in 1777, while it was in possession of the British army. At that time, and in that service, Cunningham was Provost Marshal at Walnut Street prison. He married an American lady. She was an intelligent, good-looking, well-bred woman, younger than he was some years. She was living with him in the governor’s apartments, at the time I was confined.

He was, at the period at which I am writing, about fifty years of age, five feet seven inches high, well made and well mannered. So long as I was in the prison, which was until February, 1801, I never had an angry word with him, nor any reasonable cause of complaint against him.

The histories of the Gloucester jail that I cited yesterday show that Binns was mistaken. The governor he met was not a “Provost Marshal” during the Revolutionary War—that was William Cunningham. The governor at Gloucester in that period was William’s son Thomas.

Most of the other details Binns recalled about the governor—the pension from army service, the American wife, even the lack of anger toward printers disliked by the government—match what the record says about Thomas Cunningham. He apparently looked older than he really was; he was only in his early forties, about the same age as his wife, when Binns knew him.

After being released from Cunningham’s house of correction, Binns emigrated to the U.S. of A. Eventually he settled in Philadelphia and became a significant newspaper publisher on the political left. And in that city he must have talked with people who remembered provost martial Cunningham as a villain. Binns assumed they were speaking about the same man he’d met in Littledean Jail, but he was one generation off.

Thomas Cunningham’s wife Rachel died in Philadelphia in 1814, according to her family’s genealogy. Did she cross paths with Binns again in America?

TOMORROW: A remaining mystery about William Cunningham.

(The thumbnail above shows an engraving of the Declaration of Independence that Binns published in 1819, courtesy of Monticello. Read the story of its publication here.)

Provost William Cunningham and the Family Business

Yesterday I reintroduced the figure of William Cunningham, the British military’s provost martial in Boston and then New York. He was in charge of policing the streets and housing prisoners, including prisoners of war. Americans came to hate him for what they saw as cruel treatment. The young U.S. of A. was cheered by a newspaper account of his hanging back in Britain in 1792, but later historians found no basis for that report.

What really became of William Cunningham after the evacuation of New York in 1783? Following a tip from a Boston 1775 commenter known only as Mike, last fall I went to the British Library and looked up two books by J. R. S. Whiting: Prison Reform in Gloucestershire, 1776-1820 (1975) and A House of Correction (1979). [Do I know how to enjoy a vacation or what?]

The hero of these books is Gloucestershire baronet named Sir George Onesiphorus Paul (1746–1820), who sought to reform prisons. Until then, British governments generally locked up sane people only for debt, while awaiting trial, or for short times on minor offenses. Paul felt that longer sentences were more effective against more serious crimes than corporal punishment, but also that current buildings were unhealthy. He put some of the fortune he’d inherited from his father’s woolen manufacturing behind building “houses of correction” for the county, starting with one at Littledean in 1788.

The British Dictionary of National Biography says that prison

had a chapel, a dispensary, two infirmaries, and a foul-ward in the upper story; workrooms were provided for debtors, and those who were unable to obtain work from outside were given it on application to a manufacturer, and were allowed to retain two-thirds of what they earned.

Later there was a treadwheel large enough for adults that operated through the late 1800s, according to a report of a prisoner’s death at the wheel in a magazine called The Interior. (Shown above, the building is now a tourist attraction.)

In 1789 Paul addressed the autumn sessions of the local court, saying that Gloucestershire’s new house of correction needed a governor or keeper who was “honest, sober, humane, and patient,” in Whiting’s words. The magistrates appointed William Cunningham to that post in the summer of 1790 with a salary of £200 per year. His experience as provost martial during the war was undoubtedly a plus.

Within a few years, however, Paul lost confidence in Cunningham. The new keeper was recovering from being “confined for a long time as the result of an accident.” More important, Paul had definite ideas about how to run a penal institution, and he felt that Cunningham was issuing rules too uncertainly. In other words, the notorious Provost Cunningham was not strict enough. Paul wrote that Cunningham suffered from “doubt in himself,” though the real problem may have been doubts about the baronet and his system.

At the start of 1792, William Cunningham’s son Thomas became keeper of a smaller house of correction at Horsley with a salary of £50/year. The older man fell ill that fall, and in October Thomas took over his job temporarily. Soon Paul and the other county magistrates made that switch permanent.

Thomas Cunningham carried out Paul’s system more thoroughly. In 1793 prisoners “tied a scurrilous written paper against him to the neck collar of a Dog” as a protest. But Sir George had his back, and he remained on the job for decades, receiving a £100 raise in 1797. In 1809 Thomas Cunningham was secure enough to object to having state prisoners in his county jail, saying it was “making the county of that prison a party in the war with printers, in which it has no peculiar concern.”

In 1797, William Cunningham was replaced as keeper at Horsley. This time his successor was his other son, Ralph. A couple of years before, Ralph had filled in for his father while his father had filled in for Thomas. In sum, running prisons had become the Cunningham family business. (A Loyalist officer named Ralph Cunningham was killed in 1780; I’m not sure how he might have been related to this clan.)

Father William apparently retired in 1797. I see genealogists stating on the web that he married a woman named Dorinda Robinett that year and died in Killaderry, Ireland, two years later at the age of sixty-three. However, I don’t see any sources being cited for that information.

In 1836 The Gentlemen’s Magazine reported that Thomas Cunningham had died at age seventy-seven (meaning he was born around 1759) after forty-five years of service in the Gloucester jail. His will describes him additionally as “Lieutenant on the Half Pay of De Lancey’s British American Rangers.” He had married Rachel Sayre, oldest daughter of an Anglican minister in Fairfield, Connecticut, who had resettled in New Brunswick. Curiously, the family genealogy says she died in 1814 in Philadelphia.

TOMORROW: Making sense of John Binns’s testimony about Provost Cunningham.

Nathan Hale’s Provost

Periodically Boston 1775 likes to note new Revolutionary-era comics. And here comes Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales: One Dead Spy, written and drawn by Nathan Hale, and also narrated by Nathan Hale—a semi-fictional Nathan Hale based on the real Nathan Hale. The first Nathan Hale in that sentence is not a relative of the others.

Just to confuse matters, the writer-artist Nathan Hale also did the art for a couple of terrific tall tales written by Shannon and Dean Hale, who are related by marriage, but not related to Nathan Hale.

Anyhow, here’s how star librarian Elizabeth Bird explains the premise of the first volume of Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales:

In One Dead Spy our hero Nathan Hale stands at the gallows alongside a hangman and a British Provost Marshal mere moments before he is to be hanged by the neck until dead. Suddenly he is eaten! Eaten by a big book of American history no less. After being spit out he now knows the entirety of American history and is willing to tell everything he knows. The first story that needs to be told, however, is the tale of Nathan Hale himself. And if along the way he happens to tell the stories of folks like Ethan Allen, Henry Knox, and other big and colorful characters all the better. Like a Colonial Scheherazade, Hale is spared by the childish and endearing hangman and the blowhard Provost Marshal, just so long as he keeps weaving together new tales.

And here’s the Provost, carefully labeled “semi-fictional,” and some of the remarks surrounding him fit that category.

As the art says, “There was a provost, just not him.” The real provost involved in Nathan Hale’s execution was a man named William Cunningham. In 2007 I wrote about a false report of Cunningham’s execution after the war.

TOMORROW: The truth about Cunningham’s prison career.

“Martial Law has had a full Swing”

Here’s another glimpse of life inside besieged Boston from William Cheever’s diary, now online at the Massachusetts Historical Society. This time the entry comes from 21 July 1775:

A Court martial has been held for several days upon Mess’rs Lovell, Leach and others, at which one Carpenter was sentenced to be hanged this day for carrying Intelligence over to the Provincials by swiming; however it was thought fit to reprieve him.

Martial Law has had a full Swing for this month past. The Provost with his Band entering houses at his pleasure, stoping Gentlemen from enter:g their Warehouses and puting some under Guard: as also pulling down Fences, etc., particularly Mr. Carnes’s Rope Walk and our Pasture.

The jailhouse diaries of Peter Edes, published in 1837, and John Leach, published in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1865, have lots more detail about these proceedings. Which makes sense, since they were among the accused. The royal authorities eventually figured out that the man who had corresponded with Dr. Joseph Warren before the Battle of Bunker Hill was James Lovell. They let Edes and Leach go, but kept Lovell locked up past the end of the siege.

The man named “Carpenter” was, according to Leach’s journal, a barber by trade. He swam from Boston to Dorchester in July, and then back—when he was caught. Selectman Timothy Newell’s diary has more about his dramatic reprieve from hanging. [ADDENDUM FROM MARCH 2011: His name was Richard Carpenter.]

The “Provost” was William Cunningham, whose mythical end I discussed here. He and his sons had long careers as prison wardens in Britain after the war. I need to track down a book about prison reform in Gloucestershire for more information on them.

Finally, Cheever mentions “Mr. Carnes’s Rope Walk.” This was Edward Carnes, and his house and rope factory was on the sparsely-settled side of Beacon Hill, under where Historic New England’s headquarters are now. In 1782 Carnes would marry Sarah Cheever, William’s 47-year-old aunt.

TOMORROW: Church and state.

Dorringtons Accused of “Blowing Up Flies”

As I quoted back here, Boston selectman Timothy Newell recorded that on 14 July 1775:

Dorrington his son and daughter and the nurse for blowing up flies in the evening, they are charged with giving signals in this way to the army without.

Though Newell didn’t record this detail, William Dorrington was the keeper of the smallpox hospital in the west end of town, and therefore answered to the selectmen. Presumably “the nurse” worked at the hospital as well.

The Dorrington party were examined in court on 18 and 19 July and dismissed on the 26th. Fellow prisoner Peter Edes later wrote a list of nasty acts by the prison officials that included: “Also three dollars was demanded of Dorrington, and the provost kept his bed and bedding six days, and then delivered them up.”

A few months back John A. Nagy, an author who’s looking into Revolutionary War espionage, asked me what I thought “blowing up flies” meant. The Dorringtons’ fellow prisoners used that phrase and called the family “the Fly blowers,” so apparently it didn’t strike them as odd or in need of explanation.

I found another use of the phrase in the Annual Register for 1794, which gives a clearer sense of the act:

Brighthelmstone. A dreadful accident happened yesterday at Hove, in consequence of the inadvertency of a boy who was attempting to blow up flies with gunpowder, at a public-house. He had formed a train, for this purpose, across the side of the room, at the end of which stood a closet containing a great quantity of powder. A spark of the former unfortunately got among the latter, and, such were the dreadful consequences of the explosion, that the boy had one of his eyes blown out, and his face most shockingly mangled.

Two soldiers have likewise suffered so much by the same, that their lives are despaired of. There were several more in the apartment, who escaped unhurt. That part of the room, however, where the gunpowder stood, was intirely knocked down by the violence of the shock, and the house considerably damaged.

So it looks like “blowing up flies” meant exactly what it looks like: using gunpowder to set off small explosions in order to kill flies. A lot of flies, I hope, given the trouble and risk involved. Given that cleansing the smallpox hospital involved “smoking” the rooms and linens, however, perhaps people thought explosions could kill two types of bugs with one blast.

No doubt the besieged British garrison was on edge and suspicious about explosions in town. And the Dorringtons were “blowing up flies” at night, out on the side of the peninsula closest to the Continental troops in Cambridge. So they might have been lucky to be let out so quickly.

“Imprisoned some time past”

In 2007-08, I transcribed the diary of selectman Timothy Newell during the siege of Boston, but somehow I managed to miss this entry:

14th [July 1775]. Last night was awoke by the discharge of cannon on the lines—

Master James Lovell, Master [John] Leach, John—Hunt, have been imprisoned some time past—all they know why it is so is they are charged with free speaking on the public measures.

Dorrington his son and daughter and the nurse for blowing up flies in the evening, they are charged with giving signals in this way to the army without.

John Hunt was charged on 19 July with “speaking treason,” and five days later the prison provost—William Cunningham may already have held that post—added that “Mr. Hunt had hurt his puppy dog and by God he should be confined a month longer.” But that apparently didn’t sway the military authorities, and Hunt was freed on 25 July.

Lovell and Leach were schoolteachers. British officers found some letters on Dr. Joseph Warren’s body that appeared to come from a teacher inside Boston, perhaps signed with the initials “J.L.” The army arrested both men on 29 June. Leach was set free in October, but Lovell (who had in fact sent those letters) was shipped to Halifax as a prisoner in March 1776.

TOMORROW: The Dorrington family.

(Irresistible puppy courtesy of the Massachusetts Department of Animal Health.)

The Myth of Provost William Cunningham

Boston selectman Timothy Newell took note of events large and small in his journal entry for 10 Oct 1775, but they had one theme in common: complaints about the British authorities’ treatment of locals.

A negro man belonging to [blank] wheeling a barrow load of [blank] in the Streets, the Provost came up to him and caned him to a great degree. The negro conscious of his innocence asked him why he did so—he was told it was for wheeling his barrow at the side of the street and not in the middle.

General [Thomas] Gage sailed this day for London and left several thousand Inhabitants in town who are suffering the want of Bread and every necessary of life.

Newell may have left out the name of the person who was keeping that black man in slavery because he didn’t know it. I’m pretty sure he left the contents of the wheelbarrow unnamed because it was full of dung. The town had a lot of horses, after all.

The “Provost,” or Provost Martial, was a man named William Cunningham. He worked for the British military administration in occupied Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, and made enemies among Americans wherever he went. Cunningham was in charge of prisoners of war, so it wasn’t hard for Continental sailors and soldiers to resent him. But several little episodes of unnecessary meanness like this one made him especially unpopular.

In early 1792 an article appeared in many American newspapers stating that Cunningham had been “executed in London, the 10th of August, 1791,” for financial crimes. The report then went on to quote the former Provost’s “life, confession, and last dying words,” a standard literary genre in those days of public executions. That document said Cunningham was born in Dublin in 1738, raised in a military family, and came to New York at the head of a shipload of Irish immigrants in 1774.

However, British historians later reported that there is no record of a William Cunningham being executed anywhere in Britain in 1791. The Old Bailey Proceedings of London criminal trials include no case against Cunningham. Revlist members Bart Reynolds and Bob Vogler found evidence that the man was still receiving a half-pay pension as a retired British army officer in 1792. A Philadelphian named John Binns reported meeting Cunningham in 1799 in Gloucester, England, where he was once again serving as a prison warden.

Furthermore, the New York historian Ferdinand S. Bartram wrote that Cunningham had been in New York well before 1770; he was part of the city’s Sons of Liberty movement, helping to buy land for the massive Liberty Pole. He broke from the Patriot movement by early 1775, when he got into a fight near that pole and was badly beaten. Then he left to join the British army administration in Boston.

In short, the “life, confession, and last dying words of captain William Cunningham” was a hoax, eagerly swallowed by resentful Americans but not credible in any detail. Even though its most basic statements can’t be confirmed, however, American authors have continued to rely on what that document said about Cunningham’s birth and background.

According to Binns, Cunningham had an American wife. A former prisoner remembered he had a brother who wasn’t so nasty. Contemporary British military records supplied by author Don Hagist say that he had at least one son, Capt. Ralph Cunningham, serving in the British army during the war. If anyone else has information to share about Provost Martial William Cunningham, I’d be delighted to hear it.

(It would be so much easier if William Cunningham were a less common name. The Provost Martial is not, for example, the Loyalist captain who became notorious in the southern theater of the war. Nor is he the Boston militia captain and painter.)

Deacon Newell Chooses Not to Be Seen

Yesterday I quoted Deacon Timothy Newell’s first response to demands that he turn over the key to the Brattle Street Meeting-House to a group of Loyalist Presbyterians who wanted to worship there. After a curt exchange, he refused to talk with them.

So, on 15 Sept 1775, they turned up the pressure:

As I was attending a funeral, the Provost Mr. [William] Cunningham, came to me and told me “It was his Excellency the Genls command, I should immediately deliver him the Key of Dr. [Samuel] Cooper’s Meetinghouse[”]—I replied, I must see the Governor—he told me he would not see me till I had delivered the Key. I told him, I must see the General, and refused to deliver the Key. He left me in a great rage and swore he would immediately go and break open the doors.

I left the funeral and proceeded to the Governor’s,—calling on Capt. [John?] Erving to go with me.—He excused himself, so I went alone. The Governor received me civilly. I addressed myself to him and most earnestly intreated him that he would be pleased to withdraw his order, urging that Dr. [Andrew] Elliot, in order to accommodate our people, was to preach in said Meetinghouse next Sabbath, or the Sabbath after and that the person they proposed was a Man of infamous character, which had it been otherwise, I should not oppose it &c. And I desired his Excellency would consider of it. He told me he would and that I might keep the Key, and if he sent for it he expected I would deliver it,—so left him.—

I had not been, I believed 20 minutes from him, before the Provost came with a written order to deliver the Key immediately, which I did accordingly.

When I at first urged the Governor to excuse my delivering the Key for the reasons given—he replied that a number of creditable people had applied to him, and he saw no reason why that house should not be made use of as any other. Gen’l Robinson (when I mentioned the preacher being of an infamous character) said he knew no harm of the man, but this he knew that he had left a very bad service and taken up with a good one.

The next day the Provost came to my shop, I not being there, he left word that he came for the apparatus of the Pulpit and that he must have the Key under the Pulpit, supposing the curtain and cushions were there.

The Provost the same day came again. I chose not to be there. He left orders to send him the aforesaid and swore most bitterly that if I did not send them, he would split the door open—and accordingly I hear the same was forced open[—]and that if Dr. Cooper and Dr. Warren were there, he would break their heads and that he would drag me in the gutter, &c. &c. &c.—

This being Saturday afternoon, I chose not to be seen—spent the evening at Major [William] Phillips’s—consulted with a few friends—advised still to be as much out of the way as possible.—

Dr. Elliot invited me to come very early in the morning (being Lords day) and breakfast with him and also dine, which I did and returned home after nine at night—found Serjent with a Letter had been twice at our house for me—Thus ends a Sabbath which exclusive of the perplexities and insults before mentioned, has has [sic] been a good day for me.

P.S. Capt. Erving and myself being the only persons of the Committee remaining in town, I acquainted him of the demands of the General, who advised me that if the Gen’l insisted on the delivery of the Key, to deliver the same.

The next week several of our Parish thought proper to petition the Genl.—I advised with Foster Hutchinson Esqr., who thought it very proper, and accordingly at my desire he drew a petition, but upon further consideration and hearing of the opinion of the General, he thought it best not to present it.

Provost William Cunningham was one the most notorious villains of the Revolutionary War, according to Americans. He was reviled for the suffering of prisoners of war under his care, and Americans delighted in newspaper reports that he had been hanged in England for financial crimes in 1791. However, British historians later wrote they could find no evidence that actually happened. Practically all the facts that most sources state about Cunningham’s life come from the “confession” published at his “execution,” which renders them more than a little dubious. I’ve just started digging into him (and frankly wish he had a more unusual name).

Foster Hutchinson (1724-1799) was younger brother of former governor Thomas Hutchinson. Newell might have thought he’d have some pull with the royal governor, but he apparently decided to defer to Gage instead.

I haven’t been able to identify “Gen’l Robinson.”