“This BOWL commemorative of Events prior to the American Revolution”

In August 1768 a Boston Gazette item, quoted back here, announced that Nathaniel Barber had commissioned a large silver bowl “for the Use of the Gentlemen belonging to the Insurance Office kept by” him. These weren’t his clerks, it appears, but his investors.

That group in turn invited “a Number of Gentlemen of Distinction in the Town” to drink toasts with them. The bowl’s engraving celebrated the 92 members of the Massachusetts General Court who refused to rescind the Circular Letter of 1768.

That newspaper item didn’t name the artisan who created the silver bowl: Paul Revere. Nobody then knew he’d become more famous than Barber or any of the other men whose names he engraved on the vessel.

Several of those gentlemen participated in the Boston Sons of Liberty’s dinner in Dorchester in August 1769. To be sure, there were nearly 300 other men there, too, including Revere and most members of the “Loyall Nine.”

At some point in the middle of the nineteenth century new words were engraved around the bowl below Revere’s original words and pictures:

This BOWL commemorative of Events prior to the American Revolution, was purchased of the Associates whose names are inscribed upon its surface, by Wm. MACKAY, one of their number, from whom upon the demise of the latter, in Feby 1832, it became the property of Wm. MACKAY, his Grandson in direct line, a Resident of the City of New York.

The Associates were Citizens of Boston.

Then someone added to the flat bottom of the bowl:

* at whose death in 1873, it
passed into the hands of his
Brother ROBT. C. MACKAY of
Boston

And finally, even later:

and ROBERT C. MACKAY on Mar. 11, 1902
transferred it to MARIAN LINCOLN PERRY
of Providence, Rhode Island
a great great grand-daughter of
JOHN MARSTON
one of the fifteen associates

The term “Associates” also appears in the Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings reported on a special meeting on 16 Dec 1873, when the Rev. George E. Ellis displayed that bowl for other attendees. Thay report referred to “the Fifteen Associates, belonging to Boston, for whom the bowl was made.”

It appears the M.H.S.P. article picked up the word “Associates” from the later carving around the bowl, while the engraving on the bottom may have taken the phrase “the fifteen associates” from the M.H.S.P. article.

In any event, nowhere on the bowl did the phrase “Sons of Liberty” appear, and the original newspaper report from 1768 didn’t use that term.

TOMORROW: Crossing the streams.

Capt. Daniel Malcom, Brandy, Wine, and Punch

In the mid-1760s, while John Malcom was trading out of Québec, his younger brother Daniel Malcom was becoming prominent in Boston.

On 24 Sept 1766, three high officials came to his home on Bennett Street in the North End:

• Benjamin Hallowell, Comptroller of the Customs for the Port of Boston
• William Sheaffe, Deputy Collector of the Port
• Stephen Greenleaf, Sheriff of Suffolk County

Those men had brought some lesser Customs officers as well, to do the heavy lifting.

Malcom didn’t really want the honor of their visit. Those authorities had come to search his cellar for brandy and wine allegedly smuggled onto shore without the legal duties being paid.

To be technical, the Customs officers wanted to search Malcom’s whole cellar, while he was happy to show them part of it but insisted he’d rented a locked portion to his friend William Mackay, so it wasn’t up to him to open that. Also, Malcom insisted the writs should name the officers’ source of information, which of course they didn’t want to do. And occasionally he brandished (empty) pistols to make his point.

This produced a stalemate that lasted hours. A crowd grew to watch and/or intimidate the legal authorities. Among the people involved in the incident were John Ruddock, Paul Revere, John Pigeon, John Tudor, Nathaniel Barber, and the boys of the North Latin School. Ebenezer Richardson, whom I’m speaking about tonight, hovered just off-stage.

Ultimately the Customs officials gave up on this particular search, but they used Malcom’s intractability and the threat of crowd violence to lobby for beefing up their powers. Gov. Francis Bernard ordered an inquiry. The many depositions thus created are printed in George G. Wolkins’s “Daniel Malcom and Writs of Assistance,” a study presented to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1924 and now available through JSTOR.

After that event, the Boston town meeting started to name Daniel Malcom to committees on merchants’ issues, particularly complaints about the Customs. Late in 1768 he was on hand for the Liberty riot, and his testimony about events was sent to London and even published in the St. James’s Chronicle.

Malcom, Mackay, Barber, and twelve more friends commissioned Revere to make and engrave a silver punch bowl, now in the Museum of Fine Arts. The text on that bowl celebrates the Massachusetts General Court’s refusal to rescind the Circular Letter of 1768. It’s called the “Sons of Liberty Bowl,” but those fifteen men weren’t the town’s political leaders. Daniel Malcom was the only one at the head of a crowd.

TOMORROW: 1769, a year of change.