Thomas Melvill and “a small parcel of the veritable Tea”

On 2 Mar 1850 the Boston Evening Transcript published a letter over the signature “Native Bostonian.” The editors described the writer as “a venerable citizen of a neighboring city, now a member of the House of Representatives, but a native of this city, whose father was an active partizan with Paul Revere, Melville, Sprague, and others, Sons of ’76.”

They then added more detail:

In a private note, the writer speaks of the new building on the corner of Essex and Washington streets, describing it with all the familiarity of his boyhood, as “near by where Ezekiel Russell’s Printing Office and Book Shop, sign of the Bible and Heart, near Liberty Pole, once was to be found.”

I think the mention of the Russell name was supposed to be a clue to the identity of the “Native Bostonian.”

Almost a quarter-century later, in 1874, an article in the Essex Institute Historical Collections named the letter writer as John Russell of Salem, son of William Russell (1748-1784) of Boston. (For more about William, see Francis Cogliano’s American Maritime Prisoners in the Revolutionary War.)

John Russell was born in 1779 and therefore had few direct memories of his father or Revolutionary events. That’s why he remembered “Liberty Pole” but not Liberty Tree, which came down in 1775. Russell used the stories and documents in his family to speak and write about that local history. One of his claims, first published in the Transcript article, concerned a medal carried by Sons of Liberty to identify themselves, which the Russells had lost and no one else in greater Boston ever claimed to have seen; I’m quite skeptical about that.

But today I’m looking at another artifact Russell wrote about in 1850:

Having ever felt an interest in the transactions of that eventful period, and knowing the late Major [Thomas] Melville had preserved a small quantity of the prohibited article, he having been, in common with my father and others, engaged in its destruction, he gratified me, a short time before his death [in 1832], with the sight of a small parcel of the veritable Tea, which he obtained at the time, although it was intended that not a particle of it should have been preserved;—he had it securely sealed up in a small phial;—it was of a coarse twist, and appeared to be in perfect order.

Russell added, “It is to be hoped that this interesting relic is now in safe hands, and that it will eventually, if not so already, be in the possession of the Historical Society.” But it never would be.

TOMORROW: The track of the tea.

(The picture above shows Thomas Melvill in old age and is from the collections of the Bostonian Society.)

William Russell’s Toasts on Offer

Last month I quoted an 1874 profile of William Russell that contained a description of a “Sons of Liberty” medal, worn by Boston activists on public occasions. Noting that no example of such a medal survives and no other source describes one, I expressed skepticism about that statement.

That same profile also quoted from a small document said to have been written by William Russell, a document being auctioned on 31 January by Seth Kaller and Keno Auctions. One side appears to have arithmetic exercises, perhaps from Russell’s work as a school teacher. The other reads:

May the Sons of Liberty
Shine with Lustre

Boston

Wilks & Liberty

August the 14th. 1769.

Liberty without
End. Amen.

Americans Wilks
92         45

This appears to be notes for two or three toasts delivered at a celebration of the fourth anniversary of Boston’s first Stamp Act protest. American Whigs saw themselves in league with John Wilkes, a leading political reformer in London. The numbers 45 and 92 gained great symbolic importance in 1760s Massachusetts for reasons which are easy to explain, hard to fathom.

The phrase “liberty without end. Amen” also appears as a refrain in a pamphlet titled Britannia’s Intercession for the Deliverance of John Wilkes, Esq. from Persecution and Banishment, first printed in London in 1763. Daniel Kneeland reprinted that in Boston in 1769, so the phrase was current in the town then.

Both the 1874 article and the auction house’s webpage for this document link it to the Boston Sons of Liberty banquet on 14 Aug 1769, held at the Liberty Tree tavern in Dorchester. However, the 21 August Boston Evening-Post printed all the toasts offered that day—fourteen at Liberty Tree itself in Boston’s South End and forty-five at the tavern—and they don’t include the phrases on this document.

So that left me with a picture of William Russell carefully writing out toasts in case he might be called on, and then watching as other men got invited to voice their thoughts, and the number of those men inexorably climbed to the magical forty-five, when no one else would be called. And then Russell sadly taking his little slip of paper home.

But then I checked the list of gentlemen who attended that Dorchester banquet. William Russell’s name doesn't appear on it at all. He had just turned twenty-one that year and probably wasn’t prominent enough to warrant an invitation.

So my new, cheerier theory is that Russell got together with some other young men in Boston and had their own banquet with their own toasts. Including these.

In any event, this document helps to confirm that, even if there was no Sons of Liberty medal, William Russell was involved in that movement as early as 1769. He’s also linked to the Tea Party and served in the war.

The Sons of Liberty Medal

In 1874 James Kimball wrote in the Essex Institute Historical Collections:

The following is from a private manuscript in my possession, written by Col. John Russell in 1850, whose father was one of the “Sons,” and an active participator during those stirring scenes (with Paul Revere, [Thomas] Melville, [Samuel] Sprague, etc.), a school master living during the war on Temple street, Boston.

Col. Russell says, “The Sons of Liberty consisted of an association of spirited men, who were determined to resist the oppressive edicts of the British Ministry, and to sustain and support each other in their efforts to rescue the town and country from the thraldom of tyrannic power. On public occasions each member wore suspended from his neck a medal, on one side of which was the figure of a stalwart arm, grasping in its hand a pole surmounted with a Cap of Liberty, and surrounded by the words, ‘Sons of Liberty.’ On the reverse was the emblem of the Liberty Tree. One of these medals I once had in my possession, with the initials of my father’s name, W. R., engraved thereon, but it was many years ago irrecoverably lost.”

William Russell (1748-1784) was indeed on the first published list of Tea Party members in 1835. During the war he served in Col. Thomas Crafts’s state artillery regiment and on Capt. John Manley’s ship Jason, becoming a prisoner of war twice and dying of a disease contracted in captivity. He was also Kimball’s great-grandfather.

Francis S. Drake repeated Kimball’s statement (without credit) in Tea Leaves (1884). Elbridge Goss quoted it with credit in his 1891 biography of Revere. In the juvenile biography Paul Revere: The Torch Bearer of the Revolution (1913), Belle Moses declared that Revere himself had made those medals. The Sons of Liberty medal also makes an appearance in Esther Forbes’s novel Johnny Tremain, where it serves as a secret signal among members of the society.

G. Gedney Godwin has produced its own version of the medal, shown above. The firm’s webpage credits Revere with the original design and “Bell Moses” for preserving the description.

Yet the medal John Russell described in 1850 was never found again. Nor has any other family produced or written about such a medal, despite how every other member of the Boston Sons of Liberty was supposed to own one. And there’s no contemporaneous mention of such medals, despite how those men were supposed to wear theirs on “public occasions.”

So I’m not really convinced that the Sons of Liberty actually had these medals. Or any medals at all.

William Russell’s Writing

Last month the Seth Kaller auction house alerted me to this collection of the Revolutionary War documents of William Russell (1748-1784), a Tea Party participant, charter member of Col. Thomas Crafts’s militia artillery regiment after the war began, privateer crewman under Capt. John Manley, and twice prisoner of war.

The collection includes a note from Crafts and several letters written home while Russell was in captivity in Britain or New York harbor. I see mentions of Benjamin Edes and James Brewer. Some of the material has been published in The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem, by Ralph D. Paine.

According to Francis S. Drake’s Tea Leaves, Russell was “sometime usher in Master Griffiths’ school, on Hanover Street, below the Orange Tree.” John Griffith was a private schoolteacher, rather than one employed by the town. I’ve long wondered how he had enough students to hire an usher, or assistant teacher.

Handwriting was a major part of the colonial curriculum, and Russell’s ability to write clearly was a big part of his military career. As sergeant major of Crafts’s regiment, he wrote out the first list of recruits. Later he was the regiment’s adjutant, or administrative officer, during an attempt to drive the British military from Newport.

On board Manley’s ship, Russell was a clerk. The captain was reportedly barely literate, so a clerk would have been a good thing. During his first stint as a prisoner, in the Mill Prison in England, Russell kept a detailed diary, which I believe is now at the Peabody Essex Museum. Someday I’ll quote from the published version.

Russell’s name appeared on the first published list of Tea Party members, in the back of Traits of the Tea Party (1835). One of Russell’s sons, John, had grown up to be an apprentice at the Massachusetts/Columbian Centinel; I’ve theorized that that newspaper’s publisher, Benjamin Russell, was the source of that first Tea Party list.

The same year that book came out, as the Boston Tea Party became famous, John Russell gave a lecture about the event in Salem, and of course he invoked his father’s name. I should note, however, that John Russell was born in 1779, so he had no first-hand knowledge of what happened in 1773. He was also only five years old when his father died, so he probably couldn’t sort out what he’d heard his father say from what he’d heard from other relatives. Still, Russell’s connections to Crafts and other activists make it likely that he did help to destroy the tea.