Josiah Quincy’s “clandestine Departure”

On 28 Sept 1774, Josiah Quincy, Jr., sailed for Britain aboard the Boston Packet, captained by Nathaniel Byfield Lyde.

Because the Boston Port Bill had outlawed ships traveling from Boston to other colonies or Britain, Quincy embarked from Salem.

He did so in great secrecy. Back on 20 August, Quincy had written to Samuel Adams about his plans:

I have taken my passage and sail (God willing) for London in 18 days certain. The master with whom I go, will not know who is his passenger till he is 3 Leagues below the Light house. Nay he is not to know that any one sails with him as a passenger, and it is to Leave too far to receive the orders of the owner who is our friend William Dennie (otherwise to favor the plan all in his power).

And he closed that letter: “Post PS. I desire that my sailing for London may be kept a secret as long as possible. All our friends join in the Utility of such secrecy.”

Of course, he was telling Adams, and asking Adams to spread the word among First Continental Congress delegates. On the same day, Quincy had written to John Dickinson:

My design is to be kept as long secret as possible, I hope till I get to Europe. Should it transpire, that I was going Home, our public enemies here would be indefatigable and persevering to my injury, as they have been to the Cause in which I am engaged heart and hand; perhaps more so, as personal pique would be added to public malevolence.

Quincy wanted Dickinson and other leaders from colonies to the south to tell their supportive contacts in London he was coming.

As it turned out, it took a whole month longer for Quincy to prepare for his journey, and he traveled on a different ship. Nonetheless, he was still able to keep his departure largely a surprise.

A few weeks later, Quincy’s father wrote to him:

All the Tories and some of the Whigs resent your clandestine Departure. Many of the Former say, that as soon as your Arrival is known, you will be apprehended and secured. One in particular offered to lay 10 Guineas you were not gone to London, provided another 10 Guinea were laid, that you would not be hanged when you got there. Some say, you are gone to Holland, and from thence to the south of France. Others say, the general Congress have appointed, and Commissioned you their Agent at the Court of Great Britain, and that you had your Credentials and Instructions from them before you went away.

Your Friends say, your principal Motive is the recovery of your Health, which if Providence should please to restore, they rest assured of your best Endeavours to procure, a Redress of the Grievances, and a speedy Removal of the intolerable Burthens, with which your native Country is, and has been long oppressed.

I had almost forgot to tell you, that your Sister Quincy, who is here upon a Visit, says, she heard a Gentleman say, you loved money too much, to be trusted at a Court where every thing is bought and sold: That if they could not refute your Arguments in Defence of your Country, they would offer invincible Arguments to induce you to betray it.

Thus you see, how much you are a general Subject of Conversations: Perhaps, there never was an american, not even a D[ickinson] nor a [Benjamin] F[ranklin], whose Abilities have raised the Expectations of their American Brethren more than yours. God Almighty grant, if your Life and Health is spared, that you may exceed them in every Respect.

Indeed, this does seem to be putting a lot of weight on one young attorney without any official standing, without previous contacts in London, to make a big difference in the imperial crisis.

TOMORROW: Fellow passengers.

“An authentic Copy of a Letter, which was thrown into both the Camps”?

Today I’m returning to the question of whether the letter printed in James Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer on 8 Sept 1774, naming particular Boston Whigs as the chief troublemakers, was indeed “authentic.”

Some nineteenth-century authors accepted the accompanying statement that the letter “was thrown into both the Camps, on Monday Night last,” and even called it a “handbill,” suggesting it was printed.

I see no evidence for that. None of the sources from 1774 referred to a handbill. It’s less trouble to copy two or three copies of a letter than to set it in type.

The Harvard biographer Clifford K. Shipton suggested the letter might be Patriot propaganda, aimed at riling up the Boston crowd to defend their leaders from perfidious Loyalists and redcoats.

That theory seems untenable for two reasons. First, as Charles W. Akers argued, the Patriots wouldn’t have sullied two of the town’s leading ministers with charges of being political, even while putting them in someone else’s mouth.

Even more convincing, Boston’s radical press didn’t trumpet this supposed evidence of danger but made nothing of the threats at all. The only newspaper in town to pick up the item from New York was the moderate Whig Boston Evening-Post.

In sum, the letter does seem to be a genuine Loyalist attempt to direct the attention of British army officers (and possibly enlisted men) at leading Boston Whigs. But how did that message get out?

One possibility is that copies of the letter were truly tossed into the compounds where the army was camping in Boston around the start of September 1774, with a copy sent to New York.

Another is that the writer cut out the step of distributing copies in Boston and just sent the letter to New York with a false cover story.

And the third is that the letter was created in New York, false story and all, with the real goal of influencing redcoats who were about to embark for Boston.

I lean slightly toward the last possibility because of these details:

• The lack of any mention of such a letter in Boston before it surfaced in New York.
• The reference to “both the Camps” when the Boston press always spoke of “the Camp” on the Common (even though some redcoats were camped at the South Battery).
• The slip of replacing of the name of William Dennie, a well-known Boston merchant, with William Denning, a New York merchant and activist.

It’s possible that the omission of Dr. Joseph Warren from the list of troublemakers also reflected incomplete knowledge of who the most fervent Boston leaders were, based on reading newspapers or hearing reports. To be sure, whoever wrote this letter might just have respected Warren personally and thought he didn’t deserve to be lambasted as much as others.

At the end of the year, Rivington presented readers with extracts of another letter from Boston. Mills and Hicks repeated that item in their pro-government Boston Post-Boy while Isaiah Thomas denounced part of it as “A d——d lie” in the Massachusetts Spy. So there might be a pattern here.

Of course, that’s just a guess. If I see more evidence, such as someone printing the letter before Rivington, I’ll have to rethink everything.

TOMORROW: Did this letter have any effect?

William Dennie, Merchant and Bachelor

On the list of political troublemakers in Boston published in the New-York Gazetteer in September 1774, the last name is William Denning.

There was no one in Boston with that name. In their analysis of this list, Dan and Leslie Landrigan of the New England Historical Society guessed that meant William Denning (1740–1819), a New York Whig who went on to serve one term in the U.S. House.

That makes no sense, or, as the Landrigans put it, “William Denning stands out” on a list of men from Boston because he wasn’t from Boston.

I think whoever wrote the list must have been thinking of William Dennie (1726–1783), a merchant whom the Boston Whigs pulled onto committees when they wanted more representation from the business community.

Writing in 1898, H. W. Small characterized Dennie as “a wealthy Scot.” His family roots were in Scotland, but Dennie was born in Fairfield, Connecticut, the seventh child of a large established family.

Dennie was working as a merchant in Boston by his early twenties, according to a 1752 lawsuit against William Vassall. In 1755 he joined many other businessmen in signing a petition to abate Boston’s taxes. In the next decade his shop was “at the lower End of King Street,” near the Long Wharf. Among many other goods he sold tea, some shown by John W. Tyler as coming from Holland. By 1771, the town tax list found he owned a house, a warehouse, one slave, 280 tons of shipping, and £1,500 worth of merchandise.

William’s older brother John Dennie was also a prominent Boston merchant in the 1750s, building an estate in the part of Cambridge that became Brighton. He went bankrupt in the wake of Nathaniel Wheelwright’s default in early 1765. Politically, John Dennie was a Loyalist; he remained in Massachusetts but died in 1777.

John and William’s brother Joseph Dennie also came to live in Boston. He married into the Green family who staffed many American print shops and the Boston Customs office. He went insane around 1776. Joseph’s namesake son worked in James Swan’s mercantile house as a teenager before becoming one of the early republic’s leading essayists.

Another of William Dennie’s nephews was William Hooper, who moved to North Carolina and represented that colony at the Continental Congress, signing the Declaration of Independence.

Unlike William Molineux, John Bradford, and Nathaniel Barber, three other businessmen on the 1774 list, Dennie was not prominent at many Boston protests. He was more the type to sign petitions and join clubs.

In fact, in 1768 Dennie declined to sign the town’s first non-importation agreement to oppose the Townshend duties. By early 1770, however, the Whigs had won him over, and he served on committees to remonstrate with the remaining holdouts, particularly the Hutchinson brothers.

In November 1772 Dennie agreed to be part of Boston’s new committee of correspondence while other prominent merchants, including John Hancock and Thomas Cushing, declined.

On 27 May 1774, John Rowe wrote in his diary that Dennie was one of the loudest voices booing the Customs Commissioners when they gathered for a dinner, along with Molineux and Paul Revere. Later that year Dennie was one of Molineux’s pallbearers.

That was as radical as Dennie got, it appears. He didn’t become part of the large committee to enforce the First Continental Congress’s boycott of goods from Britain. In August 1776 he begged out of serving on Boston’s wartime committee of safety. Three years later he was criticized for charging too much for duck cloth and tea, and had to go before a town committee and promise not to do that again.

William Dennie never married. According to John Mein, he “kept Mr. Barnabas Clark’s Wife [Hepzibah] many years. & employs her Husband abroad while he is getting Children for him at home.” The 1771 tax list does say Dennie was hosting Barnabas Clark (1722–1772) at his house. He later employed the Clarks’ son Samuel as a shipmaster.

In 1773 there was a dispute in Barnstable over whether that town should appoint a committee of correspondence to communicate with Boston’s. Joseph Otis recalled that a neighbor named Edward Bacon objected to the character of the Boston committee men, specifically

Mr. Mollineaux Mr. Dennie & Dr. [Thomas] Young as men of very bad Characters (as near as I can Remember), Intimating one was an Atheist, one Never Went to Meeting, and the Other was Incontinent

Molineux and Young were known for their religious skepticism, which leaves Dennie as “Incontinent”; Dr. Samuel Johnson defined that word as meaning “Unchaste; indulging unlawful pleasure.”

When Dennie died in 1783, he left legacies to many relatives, but the biggest bequest was to Hepzibah Swan (1757–1825, shown above), wife of James Swan, his executor. She was also the daughter of Barnabas and Hepzibah Clark.

John Mein and the “Well Disposed”

Since 17 Aug 1769, John Mein had been publishing manifests of vessels arriving in the port of Boston in his Boston Chronicle newspaper.

I’ve called those leaks from the Customs service, but it’s possible all Mein had to do was go to the office on King Street and copy down what incoming captains had officially declared.

Such information may seem politically innocuous, but publishing it caused a lot of trouble. Those manifests suggested that many Boston merchants, including some at the forefront of the non-importation movement against the Townshend duties, were actually importing goods. That raised resentment in Boston and suspicion in other ports.

The Whig press responded by increasing its attacks on Mein. Eventually Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette listed him on the top left of the front page among “those who have AUDACIOUSLY counteracted the UNITED SENTIMENTS of the BODY of Merchants throughout NORTH-AMERICA; by importing British Goods contrary to the Agreement.”

Mein retaliated by using the corresponding corner of the Chronicle to list the six Boston gentlemen on the committee to enforce the boycott, and by directing a series of pointed questions to them. “Do the ‘well disposed’ think the public is ignorant, that one of their number, and a Committee-man too, has been a great transgressor, though the signs of grace, which he shewed on a late occasion, entituled him to some mercy”? “Well disposed” was a label the merchants’ committee had adopted early on, and Mein proceeded to overuse it sarcastically.

On Thursday, 26 October, Mein went further, filling the front page of the Boston Chronicle with “Outlines of the Characters of some who are thought to be ‘WELL DISPOSED.’” This item took the form of a series of descriptions of books he was supposedly going to publish, hinting at the men’s embarrassing or criminal deeds.

Here are the nicknames Mein printed and the names of the men being lampooned, taken from a manuscript Mein himself wrote which is now at Harvard. The first six were the boycott committee, the rest their supporters.

• Tommy Trifle, Esq. (Thomas Cushing)
• Johny Dupe, Esq; alias the Milch-Cow of the “Well Disposed” (John Hancock)
• **** ****, Esq. (John Rowe, “Saved on Account of some late signs of Grace, tho a very rich Subject for truth & Satyre”)
• Ned Spindle (Edward Payne)
• Deacon Clodpate, alias Tribulation Turnery (William Phillips)
• Transmutation Wool-Cards, Esq; alias Deacon Conceit (John Barrett)
• **** ******, Esq. (John Erving, Jr., “Left Blank out of regard for my friend Mr. [Duncan] Stewart his Bro. in Law”)
• Counsellor Muddlehead, alias Jemmy with the Maiden Nose (James Otis, Jr.)
• Samuel the Publican, alias The Psalm Singer (Samuel Adams)
• William, the Knave (William Molineux)
• The Grunting Captain, alias one of the unclean Beasts out of Noah’s Ark (Samuel Dashwood)
• Tom Gawky, alias the English Calf (Thomas Lee, a recent arrival from England, who really didn’t merit such prominent treatment, but Mein knew embarrassing stories about his love life)
• William the Horner (William Dennie)
• Capt. Tommy Lazy, alias Market Tom, alias Belly-Gut Tom (Thomas Brattle)
• The Lean Apothecary (Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr.)

On 28 October, 250 years ago today, Mein reprinted all his shipping reports since August plus the pointed questions and an edited version of these character sketches in a pamphlet titled A State of the Importations from Great-Britain into the Port of Boston. You can read the text here.

As Mein must have expected, that ticked off some of the merchants involved. Especially the merchant captains, who were used to being masters of their little worlds. John Rowe wrote in his diary (giving no sign that he himself had nearly been named and shamed), “Mr. M—— Publication that appeared to Day has Given Great uneasiness & this evening he was spoke to by Capt. Dashwood.”

That conversation quickly turned violent.

TOMORROW: More gunshots.