“A See becoming Vacant in a Sudden Surprising manner”

As I quoted yesterday, in December 1773 the Rev. Ezra Stiles was worried by rumors from Cambridge about the sudden resignation of Harvard College president Samuel Locke.

On 20 December the Newport minister finally heard the cause, as he set down in his diary:

Mr. [William?] Ellery left Cambridge last Friday: he tells me that the Week before, President Locke resigned the Presidency of Harv. College, alledging two Reasons.

1. Ill state of Health.

2. That his Usefulness was ruined by the evil Report raised & spread abroad about him. This was that his Maid was with Child by him.

He sent in this Resigno. from Sherburn, whereto he is removed. A most melancholly Event, & humbling Providence!

Despite the nod to a claim that Locke was resigning only because of an “evil Report” about him, Stiles seems to have accepted that the president really had impregnated his maid.

I’ve found one comment about this incident from a woman. Hannah Winthrop was wife of the college professor delegated to secure college property in the president’s house. On 1 Jan 1774, she wrote to her friend Mercy Warren as quoted here:

I have no news of a domestick kind to tell you, we go on in the same little peacefull Circle as usual Varied with alternate sickness & health, sometimes Amused, sometimes astonishd with Viewing Events which happen in the great World. Here, beholding a See becoming Vacant in a Sudden Surprising manner. but it is best for one so near the seat where Candor ought to Reign, to draw a Veil over what the Delinquent tenderly Calls Human imperfections. I know you join me in earnest wishes that it may be filld with a person who may do Honor to the Station.

Harvard was already drawing a veil over a painful subject. Indeed, the college and its supporters did such a good job of keeping the “Sudden Surprising” news about Locke out of print that it wasn’t until Stiles’s diary entry was published in 1901 that historians knew about it.

Well, the Harvard librarian John Langdon Sibley (1804–1885) filed a recollection of the event from a Harvard student. And Winthrop Sargent (1792–1874) must have read John Andrews’s postscript about it, quoted yesterday, when he published other parts of the same letter. Surely other researchers had seen those sources and others. But nothing about the affair appeared in print.

No evidence appears to have survived about Locke’s housekeeper. The vital records of Cambridge list a girl named Hannah Lock, baptized at some unspecified time in 1773, with no named parents. Was this the president’s newborn daughter? Likewise, a Hannah Lock died of consumption in Cambridge on 19 Nov 1809, with no further information about her in that record.

COMING UP: Wedlock.

“The famous Jacob Bates hath lately exhibited here”

We last left the equestrian Jacob Bates as he arrived in Newport, having already exhibited his skills in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.

As I noted then, Bates didn’t advertise in Rhode Island newspapers the way he’d done in those other cities. Thus, we don’t have that sort of evidence about his shows.

But we do have a description written on 14 Nov 1773, 250 years ago today, in a letter by the lawyer William Ellery (1727–1820, shown here):

But I cannot bid you adieu in this solemn manner. Totus mundus agit histrionem. [The whole world’s a stage.] The famous Jacob Bates hath lately exhibited here his most surprising feats of horsemanship, in a circus or enclosure of about one hundred and twenty feet in diameter, erected at the east end of Mr. Honyman’s field. The number of spectators was from three to seven hundred. He exhibited four times, and took half a dollar for a ticket.

A mountebank doctor, who lately came into America from some part of Europe, (Great Britain, I believe,) and who is expected here, is now haranguing daily, from a wagon, to the good gaping people of Connecticut, and, while they are gaping, he is picking their pockets. Strolling players we have had among us. I expect that, in a few years, Drury Lane and Sadler’s Wells, &c., will be translated into America.

I wish, while we are encouraging the importation of the amusements, follies, and vices of Great Britain, America would encourage the introduction of her virtues, if she have any; for I am sure, by thus countenancing her follies and vices, we shall lose the little stock of virtue that is left among us. This I am very clear in, that exhibitions of players, rope-dancers, and mountebanks, (I must confess, indeed, there is something manly and generous in the exhibitions of Mr. Bates; for a well-formed man, and a well-shaped, well-limbed, well-sized horse, are fine figures, and in his manage are displayed amazing strength, resolution, and activity,) have a more effectual tendency, by disembowelling the purse, and enfeebling the mind, to sap the foundations of patriotism and public virtue, than any of the yet practised efforts of a despotic ministry. But it will be in vain to talk against these things, while there are a hundred fools to one wise man.

Like the person who wrote to the Boston Evening-Post quoted here, Ellery saw Bates as the sort of London showman that good New Englanders should beware of. Yet he also viewed that particular equestrian act as better than other theatricals. Indeed, he appears to have enjoyed the spectacle.

The “Mr. Honyman” who provided land for Bates’s display was probably James Honeyman, Esq. (1710–1778), a prominent lawyer and broker of marine insurance. His namesake father had been rector of Newport’s Trinity Church. In the early part of his career Honeyman was elected to various offices, including Rhode Island attorney general. By this time, however, he held royal appointments instead since he leaned toward the Crown in politics. During the war Honeyman resigned his remaining government posts and tried to sit out disputes.

William Ellery himself went on to represent Rhode Island in the Second Continental Congress, arriving just in time to vote for and sign the Declaration of Independence and remaining until 1785.

Anti-Stamp Act Protests in Rhode Island

Public protests against the Stamp Act spread outside of Boston in August 1765 so quickly that I’ve fallen behind the sestercentennial anniversaries of those events.

Since the Newport Historical Society is commemorating that port town’s protests with a reenactment today, I’m focusing on the events in Rhode Island.

On 24 August, ten days after the first protest at Boston’s Liberty Tree, A Providence Gazette Extraordinary appeared. William Goddard (1740-1817) had stopped publishing this newspaper in May. This special issue was “Printed by S. and W. Goddard,” the “S.” being William’s mother Sarah (c. 1701-1770).

Sarah Goddard resumed the weekly publication of the paper in 1766 as “Sarah Goddard, and Company.” From January 1767 to 1769, the colophon clarified that she printed “(In the Absence of William Goddard),” the son having gone on to other cities. Finally she sold the business to employee John Carter, who maintained the paper for decades to follow. Her daughter, Mary Katherine Goddard, established a print shop in Baltimore.

That issue of the Providence Gazette was extraordinary indeed, being almost entirely devoted to one political cause:

• Above the masthead it proclaimed, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” (“The Voice of the People is the Voice of God”).
• The essays were all about the problems with the Stamp Act, including a paragraph from Isaac Barré’s speech in Parliament.
• The news was all about anti-Stamp Act protests in Boston and Connecticut, and similar disturbances in Britain.
• The paper printed five resolutions from the Providence town meeting modeled on the resolutions that the Virginia House of Burgesses had reportedly passed that spring.
• The last page described a new paper mill that the Goddards were helping to build outside Providence—a business potentially at odds with the Stamp Act.

In his history of the Revolution, the Rev. William Gordon wrote that “Effigies were also exhibited; and in the evening cut down and burnt by the populace” in Providence on this date, but I haven’t found any confirmation of that.

Instead, the next big development in Rhode Island appears to have happened down in Newport on 27 August. Here’s the description of that day published in the 2 September Newport Mercury:

Last Tuesday Morning a Gallows was erected in Queen-Street, just below the Court-House, whereon the Effigies of three Gentlemen were exhibited, one of whom was a Distributor of Stamps, which was placed in the Center. The other two were suspected of countenancing and abetting the Stamp Act.

Various Labels were affixed to their Breasts, Arms, &c. denoting the Cause of these indignant Representations, and the Persons who were the Subjects of Derision.—They hung from Eleven o’Clock till about Four, when some Combustibles being placed under the Gallows, a Fire was made, and the Effigies consumed, amidst the Acclamations of the People.—The whole was conducted with Moderation, and no Violence was offered to the Persons or Property of any Man.

A report published in London later that year offered some more physical details: “about nine o’clock in the morning, the people of Newport, in Rhode Island, brought forth the effigies of three persons, in a cart, with halters about their necks, to a gallows, twenty feet high.”

Notably, the Mercury didn’t identify the three “Persons who were the Subjects of Derision,” even by initials. But everyone in town knew who they were:

• Rhode Island’s stamp-tax collector, Augustus Johnston (c. 1729-1790).
• Martin Howard, Jr. (1725–1781), a lawyer who had written a pamphlet titled A Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax to His Friend in Rhode Island, supporting the Stamp Act—a very rare position for an American to take.
• Dr. Thomas Moffatt (c. 1702–1787), another supporter of stronger royal government.

Moffatt later identified three merchants—Samuel Vernon (1711-1792), William Ellery (1727-1820), and Robert Crook—as guarding the spectacle from local officials, just as the Loyall Nine did in Boston. The doctor also said that to build a crowd they “sent into the streets strong Drink in plenty with Cheshire cheese and other provocatives to intemperance and riot.” Yet that day ended with no other destruction than the burning of the effigies.

TOMORROW: But it wasn’t over yet.

Mr. Redwood’s Wig

Scott Stephenson alerted me to this delightful entry from the diary of William Ellery (1727-1820, shown here), Rhode Island delegate to the Continental Congress.

In 1778 Ellery was traveling to Philadelphia with William Redwood (1726-1815), a Philadelphia merchant who had been born in Newport:

Nov. 5th. Took the route through Paramus and breakfasted at a Dutchman’s about 7 miles from Coe’s, and were well-entertained.

A little diverting affair took place here: The Children who had never before seen a Gentleman with a wig on, were it seems not a little puzzled with my friend’s head-dress. They thought it was his natural hair, but it differed so much from mine and theirs in its shape that they did not know what to make of it. The little boy after viewing it some time with a curious eye, asked his mother, in Dutch, whether it would hurt my friend if he should pull his hair. The mother told us what the boy had said, whereupon my friend took off his wig put it on the head of the boy and led him to the looking-glass. The mixture of Joy and Astonishment in the boy’s countenance on this occasion diverted us not a little. He would look with astonishment at Mr. Redwood’s bare head, and then survey his own head, and the droll figure he made with the wig on, made him and us laugh very heartily. It is not a little remarkable that children who had lived on a public road should have never before seen a wig.

From thence to Newark is 9 miles and to Elizabeth Town 6 miles, where we lodged at one Smith’s. A Detachment of the Army under Ld. Stirling was here. The Officers had a ball at Smith’s and kept up the dance till three o’clock in the morning. Drum, fife and fiddle, with an almost incessant saltation drove Morpheus from my Pillow.

Ellery’s diary was published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1888.