“Townspeople took four brass cannon”

Here are all the entries from Thomas Newell’s 1774–74 diary that pertain to artillery and thus show the coming of war.

• 4 June 1773: “King’s birthday; general training; the grandest appearance ever known in these parts.”

John Rowe wrote about this same militia exhibition in honor of the king:

Colo. [John] Hancock & Company of Cadets, Major [Adino] Paddock & Artillery, Colo. [John] Erving & the Regiment, Colo. [David] Phipps & Company all made their appearance in the Common — Such a Quantity or Rather Multitude of People as Spectators I never saw before, they behaved very well.

Phips commanded the horse guards.

• 1 July: “Major Paddock’s son drowned at Cambridge River.”

Adino Paddock was a coachmaker as well as commander of Boston’s militia artillery company. His son John was a student in Harvard College’s class of 1776, carrying the family’s hopes to secure their rise into gentility, when he died at age seventeen.

• 15 September: “General training.”
• 22 September: “General training for the last time this year.”
• 12 November: “Workmen began to set another row of elms in the common.”

Paddock instigated the planting of trees along Tremont Street, opposite his coachyard. Years after he had left Boston as a Loyalist, those would still be called the “Paddock elms.”

Gen. Thomas Gage arrived as the new royal governor in May 1774, and the following summer was punctuated by the arrival of more army units, including companies of Royal Artillery:

• 2 July: “A.M. Artillery from Castle William landed, with eight brass cannon, and encamped in the common. 258 sheep given for the relief of this town by the town of Windham, in Connecticut. (I cut my hair off.)”
• 6 August: ”The Scarboro. man-of-war arrived, nine weeks from England; P.M. three transports from Halifax, with the 59th Regiment on board, and company of artillery, and brass cannon, eight days out.”
• 7 August: “A.M. three transports from New York with the Royal Regiment of Welsh Fusileers and detachment of Royal Artillery, and a quantity of ordnance stores, &c.”
• 8 August: “Company of artillery landed; encamped in common.”

Soon after Gage put the Massachusetts Government Act into effect, he had his soldiers remove militia gunpowder from the storehouse in Charlestown. That set off a big reaction in the countryside:

• 1 September: “This morning, half after four, about 260 troops embarked on board thirteen boats at the Long Wharf, and proceeded up Mystic River to Temple Farm, where they landed; went to the powder-house on Quarry Hill, in Charlestown bounds, from whence they have taken 250 half-barrels of gunpowder, the whole store there, and carried it to the castle. A detachment from this corps went to Cambridge and brought off two field-pieces.”
• 2 September: “From these several hostile appearances, the county of Middlesex took the alarm, and on last evening began to collect in large bodies, with their arms, provisions, and ammunitions, &c. This morning some thousands of them advanced to Cambridge, armed only with sticks. The committee of Cambridge sent express to Charlestown, who communicated the intelligence to Boston, and their respective committee proceeded to Cambridge without delay. Thomas Oliver, S[amuel]. Danforth, J[oseph]. Lee, made declaration and resignation of a seat in the new constituted council, which satisfied the body. At sunset, they began to return home. At dark, rain and thundered very hard.”

That “Powder Alarm” uprising prompted Gen. Gage and Adm. Samuel Graves to strengthen Boston’s military defenses against attacks from land.

• 3 September: “Four large field-pieces were dragged from the common by the soldiery and placed at the only entrance into this town by land. The Lively frigate, of twenty guns, came to her mooring in the ferry-way between Boston and Charlestown.”
• 5 September: “Artillery training.”
• 15 September: “Last night all the cannon in the North Battery were spiked up: it is said to be done by about one hundred men (who came in boats) from the man-of war in this harbor.”
• 17 September: “Last night, townspeople took four brass cannon from the gun-house near very near the common.”

Newell conflated two events in that last entry. Maj. Paddock’s militia artillery had two gunhouses, each containing one pair of small cannon. As other sources show, persons unknown spirited away the two cannon in the old gunhouse on the night of 14–15 September. When Royal Artillery officers opened the new gunhouse on 17 September, they discovered its two cannon were gone, too.

Newell’s diary entry shows that many Bostonians knew about those events even though they were never reported in the newspapers or in Gen. Gage’s letters to the government in London.

• 20 September: “Some cannon removed (by the man-of war’s men) from the mill-pond.”

People had tried to smuggle these guns up the Charles River, but their boat got hung up on the dam that formed the Mill Pond and they had to abandon it.

• 3 October: “Artillery training for the last time this year.”

Since the train’s weapons had vanished, and most of the company’s men were refusing to serve under Maj. Paddock, there probably wasn’t a lot of artillery training accomplished that day.

• 22 October: “This morning, about 7 o’clock, after three days’ illness, Mr. William Molineaux died, in the fifty-eighth year of his age. (A true son of liberty and of America.) It may with truth be said of this friend, that he died a martyr to the interest of America. His watchfulness, labors, distresses, and exertions to promote the general interest, produced an inflammation in his bowels, of which he died. ‘Oh, save my country, Heaven,’ he said, and died.”

Molineux was involved in many acts of resistance, and among the last was buying four cannon from Duncan Ingraham, Jr., in September or October 1774. Those guns were sent out to four rural towns to be equipped for use by spring. 

• 23 October: “This day four transports arrived here from New York, with a company royal artillery, a large quantity of ordnance stores for Castle William, three companies of the Royal Regiment of Ireland, or the 18th Regiment, and the 47th Regiment on board.”

This one document thus shows us both sides of the political conflict preparing for military action—with cannon.

Ultimately those efforts led to the British army’s march to Concord and to war. I’ll tell that story at the Scituate Historical Society this week.

Thursday, 15 May, 7–8:30 P.M.
Secrets on the Road to Concord
G.A.R. Hall, 353 Country Way, Scituate

Admission is $15, or $10 for society members. Reservations are recommended, but payment will be accepted at the door. I look forward to meeting folks there.

TOMORROW: Thomas Newell and the tea.

“Admiral Renegado, came to anchor in Port Despair”

At the start of February 1770, the big news in Boston was the non-importation movement, and particularly the weekly demonstrations by schoolboys in support of it.

That is to say, every Thursday when the schools let out early, gangs of boys would converge on the shop of someone who hadn’t signed the non-importation agreement, set up a picket line, and shout insults at that shopkeeper and his or her customers. If the kids were feeling feisty, they’d throw snowballs and mud as well.

The Boston Chronicle, which opposed the movement, responded on 1 February with a fictional advertisement:

Intended speedily to be acted,
By a Company of young Tragedians,
A TRAGEDY
(Not acted here these seventy-eight years,)
called the
W I T C H E S,
With many Alterations and Improvements.

(The full item is quoted back here.)

That slammed the Whigs’ boycott, tweaked the town’s ban on theater, and poked at the sore spot of the Salem witchcraft trials all in one. It was masterful trolling before that term was invented.

Four days later, the Boston Chronicle fictionalized another common newspaper item with this start:

S H I P   N E W S.
January 25, 1770.
Last Tuesday Evening the “Well disposed” [i.e., Whiggish] fleet, under the command of ADMIRAL RENEGADO, came to anchor in Port Despair, having left their stations that morning in great confusion on the appearance of an English VICE ADMIRAL, with the British STANDARD flying at the mast head.

This was commentary on how William Molineux led a crowd to confront Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s two importer sons at his house—an action that even Josiah Quincy, Jr., had warned could be treated as treason—and how that action had fizzled out.

Exactly one month after the second article, the Boston Massacre occurred. To defuse tensions in the streets, Hutchinson decided to have the 29th and then the 14th Regiments moved to Castle William.

As a result, in the following months there was no governmental force in the streets of Boston strong enough to deter the Whigs and their supporters. Crowds tarred and feathered Customs officer Owen Richards in May and threatened Scottish merchant Patrick McMaster with the same punishment in June.

In that atmosphere, I suspect, the printing staff of the Boston Chronicle didn’t feel safe publishing another item lampooning and lambasting the local Whigs. Somebody in that shop—or perhaps more than one somebody—composed a long article that built on three items the paper had already run:

• Caricatures of prominent Whigs like “Tommy Trifle” and “Johnny Dupe” from October 1769’s “Outlines of the characters of…the Well-Disposed.”
• The fake theatrical announcement.
• The name “Admiral Renegado.”

Instead of publishing that piece in their own newspaper, however, they sent it to Anthony Henry in Halifax. Obviously, disguised gossip about Bostonians had less meaning for readers in Nova Scotia. But after he ran the piece on 8 May, it could filter back to its targets without sparking a riot. Not that any Boston printer dared to reprint it.

The October 1769 “Outlines of the characters of…the Well-Disposed” is always attributed to John Mein, publisher of the Boston Chronicle. He left a written key confirming the targets, so he was obviously involved in the production. But someone at the Boston Chronicle must have carried on in the same mode after Mein was driven away the next month. That person most likely wrote the piece published in Halifax.

TOMORROW: The most likely author.

“A Tragi-comic Farce, Called the present Times!”

Page 7 of the 8 May 1770 issue of Anthony Henry’s Nova Scotia Chronicle was nearly entirely taken up with what looks like an extraordinarily detailed advertisement for a play.

It began:

Just ready for the PRESS,
A Tragi-comic Farce,
Called the present Times! Some of the Characters in high Life, some in low. It is proposed to be acted by a Set of Comedians shortly expected; at a new Theatre in the enchanted Castle, at the Palace of the Sons of Liberty. Those who subscribe for Six Copies, will have the Seventh gratis; each stitched and bound, with a Variety of elegant Cuts, done by a masterly Hand! As there are already 5000 subscribed for, those who hereafter may be desirous to be out of that Number are requested to direct their Letters, (Post paid) to Don Joseph Azevedo at the Pontac Coffee House, HALIFAX, where Subscriptions are taken in.

The one mention of this newspaper item that I’ve found in books appears to treat it as authentic evidence of theater in Canada. But its real nature is revealed by the paragraphs that follow.

The Characters chiefly attempted are as follows.

William the Knave, introducing the Spinning Wheels, &c., &c. with a Bill of Taxation in his Hand (in order to support Home Manufactures) of Six Pence L[egal] M[oney] per Head on the whole P[rovince] of M[assachusetts] B[a]y; a great Procurer of Affidavits.

Thomas Trifle, Esq; Leading a drunking Man with a Glass of New-England Rum in his Hand, as a Cordial Specifick against all Disorders, lately chosen a great Officer for Indian Affairs.

Simple John, Lieut. Mandarin, demanding Audience of the Heads of the Junto, exclaiming against his Brother Commissioners of the Tribute Money to be collected—Treating the Rabble with good Chear in Hopes of reigning once more alone.

Back in October 1769 the Boston printer and bookstore owner John Mein had printed “Outlines of the characters of…the Well-Disposed” in his Boston Chronicle, lampooning leaders of the non-importation movement in highly personal terms.

That article used “William the Knave” as its label for William Molineux, an insult repeated in the 12 Feb 1770 Boston Chronicle. “Spinning Wheels” and public money “to support Home Manufactures” were allusions to Molineux’s publicly-funded scheme to employ women to make cloth in Boston. The merchant had also been busy helping to promulgate the depositions about the Boston Massacre.

The same “Outlines” article called Thomas Cushing, chairman of the merchants’ committee for non-importation and speaker of the Massachusetts House, “Tommy Trifle, Esq.”

“Simple John” must mean John Temple, the one Customs Commissioner to side with Boston’s merchants against the rest.

One of the few characters presented in a positive light was “John Plain Dealer, a Bookseller flying the Country.” A later entry mentions “Lieut. Col. Thomas Shears, his Valour is well known by his formal Attack on John Plain Dealer…”

Soon after that “Outlines” article appeared, a group of Boston merchants threatened Mein in the street. When the printer pulled out a pistol, Thomas Marshall, a tailor and militia officer not involved in the initial confrontation, swung at him with a shovel. Mein went into hiding and soon fled Boston.

“John Plain Dealer” obviously meant John Mein himself, and “Lieut. Col. Thomas Shears” meant Thomas Marshall.

This whole page in the Nova-Scotia Chronicle was a continuation of an argument that had started in Boston more than half a year before.

TOMORROW: More characters.

The Sentencing of Ebenezer Richardson

On 21 Apr 1770, as recounted back here, a Suffolk County jury found Ebenezer Richardson guilty of murdering young Christopher Seider.

The judges had instructed the jurors that all the evidence indicated Richardson had fired his gun in self-defense as a crowd attacked his house and family, so the worst they could convict him of was manslaughter. Judge Peter Oliver insisted that the facts showed Richardson was innocent of any crime.

The jurors ignored those instructions and came back with a guilty verdict. And the law provided only one punishment for a convicted murderer: death.

Instead of passing that sentence immediately, the judges adjourned the court.

The next time they met, one judge was ill, so they once again didn’t pass sentence.

In September, the judges called the jurors back into court to ask about their deliberation, whether the angry crowd in the courtroom had influenced them. The judges were seeking any reason to overturn the verdict. But no opportunity presented itself.

Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wrote to his superiors in London, seeking a royal pardon for Richardson. He could have issued a pardon himself as governor, but he didn’t want to take all the heat for that decision.

In February 1771, the London ministry responded by sending back notice that the king (which really meant the privy council) had put Richardson in for a pardon.

Ever the stickler, Hutchison thought that paperwork had to be complete to stand up to scrutiny. He asked for something clearer, more legalistic.

Meanwhile, Richardson was still in the Boston jail. That was when the press referred to him by such epithets as “the rank, bloody, and as yet unhanged Ebenezer Richardson.”

Richardson’s mother died while he was imprisoned.

On 10 Mar 1772, the Boston town meeting scheduled a discussion of William Molineux’s petition that he shouldn’t have to pay back money the town had loaned him to fund a public-works spinning project. Molineux brought supporters to Faneuil Hall to press for his case. Ultimately, justice Richard Dana stated the law didn’t allow for a loan like that to be forgiven. But the town didn’t press for the overdue repayment, either.

That same day (which wasn’t a coincidence), the royal judges summoned Richardson from jail. On 3 March, new paperwork had arrived from London, and Hutchinson passed it on to the judges. The 12 March Boston News-Letter reported what followed:

The Case of Ebenezer Richardson, who by Verdict of a Jury was found Guilty of the Murder of Christopher Seider, having been certified and laid before the King, His Majesty has been pleased to grant his most gracious Pardon, the Evidence of which, in the usual Form being laid before the Judges of the Superior-Court on Tuesday last, and the said Richardson having then entred into Recognizance to plead the said Pardon, when called upon, he was liberated from Prison where he has been confined above two Years.

Ebenezer Richardson was free. But of course he was still the most hated man in Boston.

TOMORROW: Fleeing the town.

“Thus ended the Superior Court”

As I described yesterday, when the Massachusetts Superior Court tried to open a new session in Boston on Tuesday, 30 Aug 1774, all the men chosen for juries refused to serve under Chief Justice Peter Oliver.

John Adams was away at the First Continental Congress, so his former clerk William Tudor described the judges’ response for him: “The Court told them they should consider of their Refusal, and then adjourn’d to next Day.”

The jurors didn’t change their minds. On the morning of 31 August the court sat again. Oliver and associate justices Foster Hutchinson and William Browne were at the Province House, meeting with Gen. Thomas Gage as part of his appointed Council. That body advised the governor to keep his redcoats in Boston and not “send any Troops into the interior parts of the Province.”

Tudor wrote that the justices who remained on the bench

…continued all the continued Actions till next Term. They agreed to let us file Complaints and to enter up Judgement on them; which we had imagined they would not consent to, as some of the Judges the first Day had said that if the County would rise and prevent them doing Business generally, they should decline finishing it partially, and the County must thank themselves for the Inconveniences of their own Madness.

The next day:

One small Point was argued by Mr. J[osiah]. Q[uincy]. and [Samuel] Fitch, a few Complaints read, and after Mr. Fitch, in Complyance with a previous Vote of the Bar, had reccommended four of Us to be admitted to the Atty.’s Oath, the Court adjourn’d to next Day.

Tudor was among the young men hoping to be admitted to the Boston bar at this session.

On the morning of Friday, 2 September, “there were a Number of printed Bills stuck up at the Court house and other Parts of the Town, threatening certain Death to any and all the Bar who should presume to attend the Superior Court then sitting.” Someone with access to a print shop had produced those death threats, making them all the more ominous.

The justices postponed “All the new enter’d Actions” as well as the old ones. Then the jurists noticed that people were taking advantage of the lack of juries to enter appeals, thus postponing judgments against them. Tudor wrote to Adams at length on whether this tactic was valid. “You had but one [case] in this Predicament,” he added.

The court swore in one new attorney: Nathaniel Coffin, Jr., a professed Loyalist. The other three young men hung back. Finally, the justices adjourned. “Thus ended the Superior Court and is the last common Law Court that will be allowed to sit in this or any other County of the Province,” Tudor wrote.

That same day, thousands of rural militiamen gathered in Cambridge in what was later dubbed the “Powder Alarm.” People inside Boston worried about an armed invasion. By evening, it was clear that the rest of the province was no longer going to cooperate with the royal authorities at all.

William Molineux’s refusal to serve as a juror under Chief Justice Oliver in the summer of 1773 had grown into the legislature’s march to impeaching Oliver, crowds closing the courthouses in rural counties, Suffolk County citizens boycotting juries, and finally a halt to all Superior Court business. Colonial Massachusetts’s judicial system was frozen, and in some areas would stay jammed up until past the Shays Rebellion in the late 1780s.

“They all to a Man refus’d taking the Oath”

William Molineux refused to pay the £6 fine the Massachusetts Superior Court imposed on him for refusing jury duty in the fall of 1773.

Publicly, that was because Molineux was protesting how Chief Justice Peter Oliver accepted (or at that point not denying that he would accept) a salary from the Crown rather than the people of Massachusetts.

Privately, Molineux might have had another reason: he was in debt to Boston for £300 for money advanced for a public-works venture.

In February 1774, as the Massachusetts General Court moved to impeach Oliver, the merchant petitioned that legislature to block this fine on his behalf. The assembly declined to take action for Molineux alone.

On 28 July, Gov. Thomas Gage wrote to Chief Justice Oliver from Salem about how Molineux had still not paid his fine for refusing jury duty. He promised to support the judges if they demanded that £6 and threatened to jail the merchant.

But in August 1774 Parliament’s new Massachusetts Government Act made even more people refuse to cooperate with the court system under Oliver.

In the western counties, popular protest took the form of hundreds of men massing around the courthouses and keeping the justices out.

Bostonians didn’t dare to do that since their streets were once again patrolled by redcoat soldiers. So on 30 August they emulated Molineux’s refusal.

William Tudor (shown above later in life) wrote to his mentor in the law, John Adams, on 3 September:

Tuesday the Superior Court opened and Mr. Oliver took his Seat as chief Justice. When the grand Jury were called upon to be sworn they all to a Man refus’d taking the Oath, for Reasons committed to Paper, which they permitted the Court, after some Altercation, to read.

The Petit Jury unanimously followed the Example of the Grand Jury; their Reasons together with the others You will read in the Masstts. Spy.

The jurors’ protests were also published as handbills by Edes and Gill. Among the grand jurors were longtime activists Thomas Crafts and Paul Revere, John Hancock’s younger brother Ebenezer, and William Thompson, whose granddaughter supplied the texts to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1875.

In different ways the grand and petit jurors pointed to these reasons:

• The General Court had impeached Chief Justice Oliver.
• The Massachusetts Government Act had taken control of the courts from the people and put them under the Crown.
• Justices Oliver, Foster Hutchinson, and William Browne had accepted seats on the Council, now appointed under the new law instead of elected by the legislature as the charter specified.

The judges, attorneys, and young men waiting to be admitted to the Boston bar (like Tudor) tried to figure out what to do.

TOMORROW: The last court session.

“Mr. Molineux at their head”

I’ve traced the Massachusetts General Court’s slow march toward impeaching Chief Justice Peter Oliver in February 1774 for accepting a salary from the Townshend Act duty on tea.

I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t note how the legislature was pushed along by the Boston Whigs, and particularly by the radical merchant William Molineux.

Massachusetts politicians started to ask whether the Superior Court justices would accept Crown salaries way back in February 1773. At first those jurists put off their questioners by saying they hadn’t seen any pay warrants yet, so they weren’t in a position to answer.

In his History of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wrote:

This seemed to be a check to the progress of this business for a time; but several persons, members of the committee of correspondence for the town of Boston, thought fit to interest themselves, and presented a petition to the house, complaining of their delay, and urging further and more effectual measures.

Twenty-nine members of the house, eighty being present, had fortitude enough to vote for rejecting the petition. The other members voted for receiving and committing it. This was disapproved of by the inhabitants of the town of Boston in general, and caused a great clamour among them the next day. A few persons, it is said, with Mr. Molineux at their head, had taken upon them to direct the great council of the province.

The members for the town were alarmed, and, sensible that they had gone too far, moved, as soon as the house met, for a reconsideration of the vote for committing the petition, that the petitioners might have leave to withdraw it, and that the proceedings of yesterday should be erased. These motions were all approved of, and demonstrated the influence of three or four members over the body of the house.

Later in the summer of 1773, Molineux’s name came up on the list of petit jurors for Suffolk County. That gave him another way to protest.

On 1 September, Molineux appeared in court but refused jury duty. According to a supporter writing later in the Boston Evening-Post, he announced “that honor, justice and good conscience forbade his sitting upon the lives and properties of his fellow subjects” until the judges all denied they were accepting salaries from the Crown. He started to read from the legislature’s resolve on the issue.

Chief Justice Oliver interrupted: “Do you then refuse to serve?”

Molineux began his speech again.

“You refuse, and the law must take its course,” said Oliver.

Molineux again demanded an answer to his question about salaries.

“The court will consider of it,” said Oliver.

That consideration took the form of a £6 fine.

TOMORROW: More courtroom wrangling.

“The 5th. of Novr. being a day of disorder”

On 3 Nov 1773, as I described back in 2019, Boston saw its first tea-inspired violence.

The Sons of Liberty, using a note signed “O.C.,” had summoned half a dozen merchants to meet under Liberty Tree and resign their appointments as agents to sell the East India Company’s tea. Those activists were following the playbook of the first Stamp Act protest from August 1765.

When no merchants showed up, however, William Molineux led a crowd to the warehouse of Richard Clarke (shown here) and demanded a reply. Then they demanded entry, shoving their way inside.

Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, father of two of the tea agents and a more distant relative of others, described how that confrontation ended:

Mr. [Nathaniel] Hatch a gentleman of Dorchester & a Justice of peace commanded the peace & required them to disperse [i.e., Hatch read the Riot Act] but they hooted at him & after a blow from one of them he was glad to retreat. I was all the time in the Council chamber with as many gentlemen of the Council as I could get together but could not make a Quorum.

The mob, after they found the gentlemen determined, began to separate and thereupon a number of gentlemen, who were in the Street, went through those that remained, joined the Gentlemen who were with the consignees in the Warehouse, & guarded them through the mob who were discouraged from offering any further violence.

The next morning I met the Council who advised me, unanimously, to direct the Attorney General [Jonathan Sewall] to prosecute such persons as upon inquiry into this tumult should appear to him to have been Offenders and, as I am informed the Justice has evidence of the person who struck him, I doubt not I can prevail with him to bring forward a separate prosecution of that Offence.

The gentlemen of the town have shewn more resolution upon this occasion than I have known before and, hitherto, nothing has been done which can bring any imputation upon the Town in general. I wish the Select men had discountenanced the proceeding. I am informed a Town meeting is intended to morrow. I wish nothing may be done there which shall oblige me to give your Lordship a less favorable account.

Indeed, the selectmen’s records for 4 November read:

The Selectmen having receiving a Petition from a number of the Inhabitants praying that a Town Meeting may be called immediately for the purpose set forth in their Petition, whereupon,

Voted, that the Town Clerk [William Cooper] issue his Warrant for a Town Meeting Fryday next 10 O’Clock.

“Fryday next” meant the next day. That was also the 5th of November, or Pope Night, when Boston’s youth paraded with effigies of the enemies of the day, collecting money, before having a big rumble and bonfire.

Hutchinson wrote:

The 5th. of Novr. being a day of disorder, every year, in the town of Boston one of my sons thought it advisable to remove with his family to the Lieutenant Governor’s in town, the other came to me in the Country.

In other words, Thomas Hutchinson, Jr., went to his father-in-law Andrew Oliver’s house in Boston, and Elisha Hutchinson left town for his father’s mansion in Milton. Other tea consignees probably took similar protection action.

A town meeting was the most official way for Boston to take political action while the Pope Night processions were the least respectable. How would that Friday play out?

TOMORROW: The 5th of November in 1773.

Speaking of William Molineux

The Patriot leader William Molineux died unexpectedly on 22 Oct 1774. That news came as the long political confrontation between Boston and royal officials was turning into a military confrontation between Massachusetts and the Crown.

Molineux had been one of the most visible of the Boston Whigs since the non-importation movement. He was always at the front of the crowd during outdoor protests, pushing for harder responses in meetings. In 1774 alone Molineux:

• was defying a judicial order to serve on a jury as a protest against the judges accepting salaries from the tea tariff.
• led Bostonians in booing the Customs Commissioners at a banquet in May. 
• addressed the crowd in Cambridge during the Powder Alarm in September.
• helped to collect cannon for the resistance in October. 

And then Molineux was dead. His sudden disappearance from the scene raised tensions and sparked rumors. It also caused his memory to fade since he wasn’t around for the Revolutionary War or the new federal government.

For The Road to Concord I wrote a long chapter about Molineux leading up to his death, what I thought would be the most detailed study of him yet published. And then, because the manuscript was too long, I cut that chapter and another that weren’t tightly tied to the main narrative about stolen cannon.

Last month Bob Allison and Jonathan Lane of Revolution 250 invited me to come onto the coalition’s podcast. They suggested I might have something to say about Molineux. Well, I had a lot to say about Molineux!

You can listen to that conversation through Buzzsprout and other major podcast platforms.

[I’ve provided a link to the audio podcast. If you watch the video on YouTube or Facebook, it’s not just that that camera performs poorly in dim light. Right now I really do have a beard.]

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.

“A brave and valiant sea-commander, only a little bashful”

When James Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer ran what it said was a letter alerting British army officers in Boston to the men behind the town’s political troubles, its list of fifteen names included two we don’t usually read among Revolutionary leaders:

• “Capt. John Bradford”
• “Major Nathaniel Barber”

Both those men do already have tags here on Boston 1775, but you know this is an unusual place.

Neither Bradford nor Barber were elected to major political offices or wrote significant newspaper essays (that we know about). They weren’t in the top tier of Boston organizers, nor in my view in the next tier, either. They were too old to fight in the war, serving in civil offices instead, and neither survived the 1780s to help construct the federal government, two ways people got remembered.

Nonetheless, as their titles suggest, Bradford and Barber commanded respect in colonial Boston. Both were staunch Whig businessmen, the sort who spoke out in town meetings, signed protests, and served on committees. Indeed, both Bradford and Barber were part of Boston’s first committee of correspondence in 1772 and then the larger committee to enforce the Association boycott in 1774.

John Bradford (1735–84) was a merchant captain, sailing ships to London and Jamaica. In his study Smugglers and Patriots, John Tyler reported evidence that Bradford belonged in both categories. In 1775 the printer John Mein would call Bradford “a brave and valiant sea-commander, only a little bashful, which is well known to the underwriters in London.” Unfortunately, it’s not well known to us what Mein was referring to, probably sarcastically.

In the 1760s Bradford stopped commanding the ships himself, settled into his North End home, and focused on managing imports through his shop in Boston. He was elected an Overseer of the Poor in 1768 and a warden in 1772.

Bradford was also a slave-owner. Among his servants was a teenager born in Africa and renamed Chloe Spear, subject of a biography published in 1832 by Rebecca Warren Brown, daughter of Dr. John Warren. According to that book, Spear sought to learn to read by studying a psalter:

She kept the book secreted in her pocket, and whenever she had a few moments leisure, she would take it out and try to spell a word. While thus engaged one day, her master discovered the book in her hand, and inquired what she was doing. She told the truth, and this led to a full disclosure of the case. He angrily forbade her going again to the schoolmistress for instruction, even under penalty of being suspended by her two thumbs, and severely whipped; he said it made negroes saucy to know how to read, &c.

Nonetheless, Bradford joined the crusade to preserve political liberty for men like him.

In 1769–70 Bradford was among several Boston merchants who enforced the non-importation agreement—walking aboard ships, demanding Customs documents, leaning on merchants who defied the boycott. After James Otis, Jr., and Customs Commissioner John Robinson brawled in the British Coffee-House, Bradford was seen “looking for Mr. Otis’s Hat & Wig.” He was also on the town committee to hire a ship to carry the town’s report on the Boston Massacre to London, though cost worries scuttled that plan.

On 2 Sept 1774, a week before the New York newspaper item appeared, Capt. John Bradford was among the Boston Whigs who went out to Cambridge to calm the militiamen gathered in the “Powder Alarm.” After two colleagues, William Cooper and William Molineux, told the crowd that the gunpowder the royal authorities had seized was probably old and worthless anyway, Bradford had the boldness to publicly disagree. (The next month, Bradford was a pallbearer at Molineux’s funeral.)

The Bradford household appears to have escaped from the siege of Boston as refugees in Andover, boarding with a family named Adams. Their host helped Chloe Spear learn to read and converted her to a fervent Christianity.

In April 1776 the Continental Congress appointed Capt. Bradford its prize agent for all British ships captured and brought into Boston harbor—which some historians estimate amounted to half of all the prizes that Americans captured during the war. Bradford also became an agent for the Congress’s marine committee, purchasing ships and supplies. Those responsibilities reflect both his nautical knowledge and how the Boston Whigs believed Bradford deserved trust and rewards.

According to the Chloe Spear biography:

As a reward of her integrity, her master gave her a certificate of manumission, (freedom) which was to take effect at a specified period not very distant. But shortly after, by a law of the Commonwealth, all the slaves in the State were made free.

That would have been in 1783. John Bradford died in May 1784 “after a lingering illness.”

TOMORROW: Major Barber.

Public Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestic

Last month on H-Net, Tristan Stubbs reviewed D. H. Robinson’s The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, published in 2020 by Oxford University Press.

Stubbs wrote:

…this highly impressive work offers a genuinely new paradigm through which to view the years leading up to 1776. Americans made the fateful decision to secede not for the economic reasons offered over a century ago by Charles Beard and the Progressive historians; they were not the “radicals” drawn by Gordon S. Wood; and their motivations cannot be ascribed solely to civic republican ideals of virtue and liberty favored by the “canonical intellectual histories” of Bernard Bailyn and J. G. A. Pocock.

Instead, Americans had seen themselves for a long time before the Declaration of Independence as intimately connected to European geopolitics, took a deep interest in the balance of power across the ocean, and were disappointed by the metropolitan Tory government’s failure to shoulder its responsibilities in defending continental liberties against the overweening power of France and Spain. . . .

it spends an impressive amount of time on the effect on metropolitan and colonial opinions of Sweden’s 1772 reversal to absolutism and of the British government’s failure to support the Republic of Corsica against what colonists viewed as French attempts to impose Catholic “universal monarchy” not only on that Mediterranean island but throughout the French sphere of influence—including in America.

This hypothesis truly does seem like a “new paradigm,” in that I hadn’t considered inadequate protection from Catholic empires to be a major concern for the Americans resisting Crown measures from 1765 to 1775.

There would be at least a great irony if colonists adopted independence due to fear of France and Spain given how the young U.S. of A. soon allied with France and Spain. And then felt threatened by Spain/Napoleonic France as well as Britain on its new borders without the protection of a large empire.

To be sure, the Revolution in New England was fueled by suspicion of popery and ended with national freedom of religion, and the war in large slaveholding states was fueled by fear of slave uprisings and ended with slavery coming to an end in other parts of the country. So a paradoxical outcome doesn’t negate a possible cause of the conflict.

But the idea that colonial American discourse about European geopolitics strongly influenced resistance to Parliament’s new taxes and royal officials seems very tenuous. Ebenezer Mackintosh named a son after Corsican independence leader Pasquale Paoli and Loyalists claimed that William Molineux wanted “Paoli” as a nickname himself, but I really don’t see the farmers of Hampshire County shutting down their courthouse because they felt the London government hadn’t supported Paoli’s Corsican cause enough six years before. (Indeed, it was well known the British Crown granted Paoli a pension, supporting him as an asset against France.)

Today we Americans live in a much more democratic society, meaning more people are involved in political decisions. We’re privy to more news from around the world. Our economy is more globalized, as are our military forces. By all measures we should be more concerned with international relations than eighteenth-century farmers. And yet foreign policy is rarely a big factor in our politics, so was it a factor in theirs?

Robinson’s argument appears to rest on what he calls “the discursive evidence,” the same body of evidence that he says should also rule out historical hypotheses about the Revolution based on “relations between classes and genders...racism and material cultures.”

As Stubbs writes, “the discourse under investigation here was led primarily by white, male, anglophone professionals.” And in this case “professionals” appears to mean the sliver of educated, usually wealthy white men who wrote essays for the newspapers.

I have no doubt those essays used contemporary Sweden as an example of the danger of autocracy, the same way they used the Stuart monarchs and the Roman emperors. But I doubt those writings from such a narrow, well, class really got at all the forces driving political change at the time. And I’m skeptical that developments well outside the British Empire motivated colonial Americans to rebel as much as “pocketbook issues.” 

“A large Collection of interesting Papers”

In 1843, the London bookselling firm of Thomas Thorpe issued its catalogue of manuscripts for sale, “Upon Papyrus, Vellum, and Paper, in Various Languages.”

Among those items was “A large Collection of interesting Papers, formed by the late George Chalmers, Esq., relating to New England, from 1635 to 1780, in 4 vols. folio, neatly bound in calf, £21.”

Chalmers (1742-1825, shown here) was born in Scotland and at age twenty-one settled in Maryland as a young lawyer. In early 1776 he published Plain Truth, a point-by-point riposte to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. That went over so well that Chalmers soon moved back to Britain.

In 1780 Chalmers published Political Annals of the Present United Colonies from Their Settlement to the Peace of 1763. Or rather, he published the first volume of documents about the colonial governments, tracing the history up to 1688, but never produced the second.

In 1786 Chalmers became a secretary to Britain’s privy council, and he kept that postion for decades. It provided him with the income and access he needed to collect manuscripts and write books and pamphlets about the history of Scotland, Shakespeare, other authors, controversial issues of the day, and much more.

In 1796, as Britain fought Revolutionary France, the government paid Chalmers to write a critical biography of Paine. He issued that under the pseudonym of Francis Oldys, supposedly a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Otherwise, he focused mainly on British topics, particularly the long history of Scotland.

Nevertheless, Chalmers’s manuscript collection shows that he never gave up on accumulating material about the old North American colonies. After his death, his papers went to a nephew, and two years after that man died in 1841, they were on the market.

Here’s a sample of what the collection included from the Revolutionary years, according to the bookseller’s catalogue:

• Various papers relating to the paper currency in the colonies, 1740-60.
• Account of the dispute at New London, at the burial of a corpse, 1764.
• List of graduates in Harvard College, who have made any figure in the world.
• Part of Mr. Otes’s speech in the general assembly at Boston, in 1768.
• Autograph letter from W. Molineux, relating to the riots at Boston, 1768.
• Letters relating to the seizure of the sloop Liberty, 1768, very curious.
• Information of Richard Silvester, of the speeches of the Boston leaders, 1769.
• Declaration of Nathaniel Coffin to Governor J. [sic] Bernard, on the designs to drive off the Governor and Lieutenant Governor, 1769.
• Key to the characters published in the Boston Chronicle of Oct. 26, 1769, (The Boston patriots characterized.)
• Autograph letter from George Mason, containing an account of the riot and attack of Mr. Mein’s house, 1769.
• Copy of a curious letter from Boston, relating to Franklin’s duplicity, &c. 1769.
• Autograph letters from John Mein and George Mason to Joseph Harrison, concerning the riot at Boston, 1769.
• Papers relating to the outrage on Owen Richards, an officer of the customs at Boston, 1770.
• Copy of a letter from Lord Dartmouth to Dr. Benjamin Franklin, about presenting a remonstrance of the court to the king, 1773.
• Account of the proceedings of Governor Hutchinson, relating to Massachusetts, &c., 52 pages, 1774.
• Account of an attack that happened on His Majesty’s troops, by a number of the people of the province of Massachusetts Bay, 1775.

It looks like Chalmers obtained many of those documents from Joseph Harrison, a Boston-based Customs official, or his estate.

Prof. Jared Sparks (1799-1866) of Harvard College must have seen the bookseller’s listing. He apparently arranged for the college library to buy some of Chalmers’s papers in 1847 while he bought others for himself, leaving them to the library on his death. Thus, the papers listed above are now at the Houghton Library and digitized as part of the university’s Colonial North America project.

Ripples from the Boston Tea Party in 1774

Without the Boston Massacre reenactment looming over my schedule this year, I’ll devote the next few days to the events of early March 1774.

That was less than three months after the Boston Tea Party, and the ripples from that big splash in the harbor were still spreading.

Most Bostonians were excited about how the event had turned out. The local Sons of Liberty had kept the tea tax from being collected, but they hadn’t hurt any other property or any people. Other towns and ports along the American coast sent messages of support.

On 20 January an agreement among Boston merchants and shopkeepers to stop selling all tea, regardless of tax status, took effect. The Whigs hauled three barrels of tea to King Street and burned them in front of the customs house.

To be sure, there was still some tea circulating in the colony. A fourth tea ship, the William, had wrecked on Cape Cod, and some chests had been salvaged from the wreck. Local Whig crowds were chasing those down.

Meanwhile, the London government was digesting reports of disorder in Boston the previous fall—even before the tea destruction. Ministers considered the big public meetings and the attack on Richard Clarke’s family warehouse described here. On 5 February, Secretary of State Dartmouth sent Attorney-General Edward Thurlow (1731-1806, shown above) evidence about those events.

Six days later, Thurlow and Solicitor-General Alexander Wedderburn replied that several Bostonians had likely committed high treason. They specifically noted:

The conduct of Mr. [William] Molynieux, and…[William] Denny, [Dr. Joseph] Warren, [Dr. Benjamin] Church, and Jonathan [Williams?] who in the characters of a committee went to the length of attacking Clarke, are chargeable with the crime of High Treason; and if it can be established in evidence, that they were so employed by the select men of Boston, Town Clerk, and members of the House of Representatives, these also are guilty of the same offence.

The law officers also cited Samuel Adams and Dr. Thomas Young for their work on the committee of correspondence and John Hancock for participating in the armed patrols that kept the tea from being landed. Of course, securing prosecutions of any of those men was a bigger challenge.

Also in early February, King George III interviewed Gen. Thomas Gage, commander in chief of the army in North America. Gage stated “his readiness, though so lately come from America, to return at a day’s notice if the conduct of the Colonies should induce the directing coercive measures.” He also opined that those measures wouldn’t need any more troops.

And all the while, a ship called the Fortune was plying the Atlantic toward Boston, carrying more tea.

“Two peices of Cannon Brought From Watertown to ye Towns”

The 3 Feb 1775 petition to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s committee of safety about eight iron cannon can’t answer the question of what happened to those guns.

Did the congress assume control of them and add them to their other weapons? Or did they remain under the control of the four towns that had undertaken to equip them for use?

Or did the congress and the towns come to some sort of compromise, in which the towns continued to assume responsibility for those guns but expected the province to pay for the work eventually?

We don’t appear to have enough records from two of the four towns to provide definite answers. For Lexington, Alex Cain has written:

Unfortunately, what became of the guns after February 1775 is unknown. Lexington’s town meeting minutes from the Spring of 1775 were stolen years ago. Records from December 1775 through the remainder of the war do not mention the cannons.

The Weston town records show no payments related to cannon in 1775. In March 1776 the town treasurer’s account for the preceding year includes 12 shillings “Recd. of Capt. Samel. Baldwin for the Use of two Guns Belonging to the Town,” but that price suggests those were muskets, not artillery.

On the other hand, we know there were mounted cannon in Watertown on 30 March. On that day, Col. Percy led troops in a march that was part springtime exercise, part an attempt to get the provincials used to seeing redcoats come through their towns. Capt. John Barker wrote in his diary:

The 1st. Brigade marched into the Country at 6 oclock in the morning; it alarmed the people a good deal. Expresses were sent to every town near; at Watertown about 9 miles off, they got 2 pieces of Cannon to the Bridge and loaded ’em but nobody wou’d stay to fire them; at Cambridge they were so alarmed that they pulled up the Bridge.

Lt. Frederick Mackenzie noted that march, as well as another on 10 April: “The 38th. and 52ed. Regiments marched out this Morning as far as Watertown.” Later, just after the war began, he wrote: “The 38th & 52ed Regiments marched once to Watertown, which indeed occasioned some alarm, and Cannon were fired, bells rung, and expresses sent off, to give the alarm.” So not only did the Watertown militia company have two cannon, but its men could move, load, and fire those guns, and the British army knew about them.

As for Concord, we have the documentation from James Barrett of what ordnance and other material he was storing for the provincial congress. That included:

Two peices of Cannon Brought From Watertown to ye Towns
Eight Peices of Cannon Brought to ye Town by Mr Harrington
Four Peices of Brass Cannon & Two Mortar from Col Robertsons [sic—Lemuel Robinson]

Thus, when Barrett wrote this note, he controlled two iron cannon secured by William Molineux in 1774, sent out to Watertown, and then sent on to Concord for mounting. But he also had the Boston train’s four brass cannon, the two mortars that James Brewer claimed to have smuggled out of Boston, and eight more guns from some guy named Harrington (which is a whole other mystery for me). And in March more ordnance arrived from Salem.

No wonder James Warren wrote to his wife Mercy from Concord on 10 April: “This Town is full of Cannon…” A royal spy specified there were twelve cannon mounted around the Concord courthouse under twenty-four-hour guard, three 24-pounder siege guns in the courtyard of the prison, plus the brass field-pieces from Boston back at Barrett’s farm.

In mid-April, after warnings from Boston, Barrett and his family and neighbors began to move those artillery pieces even farther away. Four cannon reportedly went to the neighborhood of provincial congress receiver-general Henry Gardner in Stow. But four remained behind in Concord at the courthouse, according to Gen. Thomas Gage’s local informant. I suspect those were owned by the town, and it didn’t want to let them go.

I still don’t know who Gage’s spy was, but one candidate is Duncan Ingraham, the merchant captain who had retired to Concord a couple of years before. As described back here, his son had sold four iron cannon to Molineux in October 1774. Those comprised half of the artillery pieces that the 3 Feb 1775 petition discussed. In other words, there was a 50% chance that the pair of cannon assigned to Barrett had come from Ingraham. Had the captain spotted what he still considered his own property rolling through town?

Once again, my thanks to Joel Bohy of Bruneau & Co. and Antiques Roadshow for sharing the document from the Massachusetts archives that added new clues to this inquiry.

TOMORROW: The cannon that didn’t bark.

Searching for Mr. Molineux’s Cannon

Last month I wrote about William Molineux obtaining eight cannon for the Massachusetts resistance in the last weeks before he died on 22 Oct 1774.

When I did, Joel Bohy of Bruneau & Co. and Antiques Roadshow, a truly dedicated local and living historian, sent me a letter from the Massachusetts state archives showing what happened to those guns.

Dated 3 Feb 1775, this letter was addressed to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s committee of supply by four men from four different towns. It began:

We the Subscribers beg leave to Inform the Gentlemen of the Committe of Supply, that there was eight peices of Cannon Sent to Watertown last Fall & Committed to the care of ye Selectmen of Said town and Some time after they were informed they were under the Direction of the late Mr. Molinux,…

How Molineux and his Sons of Liberty got those guns past the army sentries on the Neck we still don’t know, but here’s confirmation they were in the hands of the Patriots by the fall of 1774.

Indeed, people had started talking about cannon in Watertown soon after the “Powder Alarm” on 2 September and the people of Charlestown removing the cannon from their shore battery five days later.

On 13 September, Customs Commissioner Henry Hulton wrote to a friend about the Patriots’ military preparations: “The people for their part are all arming, melting their lead into bullets, and draging Cannon into the Country.” From the timing that appears to refer to the Charlestown guns. In a postwar memoir Hulton wrote about how people had “secretly removed several Cannon from Boston, and dragged them into the Country beyond Watertown.” I suspect that when Hulton looked back he conglomerated several instances of cannon movement in the fall of 1774, but it’s notable that he remembered Watertown as a transport point.

Patriots expected the royal military to respond. On Sunday, 18 September, soldiers of the 38th Regiment of Foot turned out for inspection with knapsacks, suggesting they would be away from their barracks for midday dinner. Those men were actually ordered out to help built fortifications as Gen. Thomas Gage strengthened the town’s defenses. But the Boston merchant John Andrews described the local reaction in a letter:

[That] manoeuvre rais’d a suspicion in some people’s minds (who were more credulous than wise) that they were going to Watertown after the cannon: which, by being often told, came to be believ’d, and the committee here sent to inform their brethren of Charlestown, which broke up their morning service and induc’d them to proceed to Cambridge, and from thence to Watertown, alarming all as they went, to be prepar’d and ready to act upon the defensive, if attack’d.

Andrews’s phrasing suggests he’d been told there actually were cannon in Watertown, but even if he was just repeating “a suspicion in some people’s minds,” that was a good guess. Because by early October 1774, Molineux’s cannon were there, and the townspeople had to decide what to do with them.

TOMORROW: Mounting costs.

Losing Sight of William Molineux—Live Chat

From the Transactions of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts:

A Stated Meeting of the Society was held at the house of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, No. 28 Newbury Street, Boston, on Thursday, January 28, 1926, at three o’clock in the afternoon, the President, Samuel Eliot Morison, Ph.D., in the chair.

The Records of the last Stated Meeting were read and approved.

Mr. George P. Anderson spoke on William Molineux (1717–1774), a militant Boston Patriot, giving a biographical account of him and pointing out his connection with the political activities of the time.

[FOOTNOTE: Mr. Anderson’s paper will be printed in the Transactions of a future meeting.]

Alas, no such paper was ever published by the Colonial Society or elsewhere.

According to this finding aid from the University of Vermont, Anderson also “collected transcripts, chronology, notes, photocopies, articles, and other research on Thomas Young, an important figure in the American Revolution and the early history of Vermont, for a biography that was never published.” Again, alas.

Other scholars have studied Young, but Molineux has kept out of focus, in large part because he didn’t leave a body of written work. Indeed, when his public-works spinning venture prompted one of those long, drawn-out newspaper arguments in the early 1770s, someone else (maybe Young) wrote the articles on Molineux’s side. 

But we can’t understand Boston politics between 1767 and the end of 1774 without factoring in Molineux. I had a very long chapter about him and his untimely death in The Road to Concord, but it overloaded the book, so I took it out. Hopefully, it will evade the curse of Anderson’s paper and pop up somewhere else.

Tonight I’m scheduled to chat about Molineux with Jason on the Founder of the Day livestream, going live on Youtube at 8:15 Eastern time. We’ll see if I can control myself. Molineux couldn’t always do that.