“The said Inventory (A Very few Articles excepted)”

By 1787, Henry Howell Williams had been reestablished on Noddle’s Island for about three years.

Having stayed in Massachusetts throughout the war, Williams had also established his loyalty to the republic, which might have been in doubt back in 1774 and 1775.

Williams then decided to revive his effort to be compensated for the loss of his animals and the destruction of his farm and house back in May and June 1775.

Williams assembled a long list of the property he had lost twelve years before, including furniture, clothing, and food. A sampling of the items:

• “24 very Eloquent Gilt Pictures, 1 small Carpet”
• “1 Coat of Arms work'd on Satting with Silver & Gold thread”
• “40 lb. of flax 2 Barrls Hops & 3 Quntal salt fish”
• “3 Large Jarr’s Sweet meats never opened”
• “1 Mahogy. Clock cost in England 25 £ Sterl. New”
• “1 Silver Nipple & Bottle”
• “60 bullets 30 lb. Lead. 6 Powdr horns. 2 Powdr flasks”
• “1 Barrl. best hard Bread a large Quanty of Loaf Sugar”
• “1 Large Bible & Several Other Books”
• “3 Hogsheads New Rum Just got home from the W. Indies Quanty. 234 Gallons a 3/4–”
• “6 Chissells 3 dung forks. Squares &c.”
• “1 large Boat £32– 1 Moses do £14. 1 yall £10–”
• “A New Black-Smiths Shop”
• “333 Young Locust tree’s Cut down which were Set out by Mr. Williams & were to have been paid for by the Owners of the Island at 3/ Each”

As to livestock, Williams stated he had lost:

43 Elegant Horses...@ 30£ Each put into the Publick Stables … £1290:11:—
3 Cattle taken & used as Provisions for the Army … 30:11:—
220 Sheep used as Provisions as above @12/- … 132:11:—
4 fine Swine … 12:11:—
5 Dozn Fowls Turkys & Ducks … 6:11:—

The bottom line was £3645:6:2. That might or might not have been in debased local currency, but pound for pound that total was more than a third of what the East India Company had calculated as its loss in Boston harbor back in 1773.

On 10 Mar 1787, Williams and his wife Elizabeth went before magistrate William Tudor (shown above) and swore

That the said Inventory (A Very few Articles excepted) was taken in the month of July following [the raids] & that according to my best Judgment and Recollection the Same is just and true

The whole document can be studied on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s website.

In addition, Williams had collected some evidence supporting his claim, or perhaps answering critics who had said back in 1775 and 1776 that he didn’t deserve financial support.

TOMORROW: Supporting documents.

“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.

“I should not have chose this town for an Asylum”

On 17 June 1775, as I quoted yesterday, John Adams complained that five friends from Massachusetts hadn’t sent him any letters with news about the province since he’d left for the Second Continental Congress.

I decided to look into what those men did in the previous two months.

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper had fled from Boston on 9 April, halfway through Sunday services, wary that Gen. Thomas Gage might order his arrest. He settled in with Samuel P. Savage in Weston. By the end of the month Cooper had his wife, daughter, and clothing with him, but not his library or all his letters.

In early May, Cooper arranged to stand in as the minister in Groton. Or rather, since that town was far away and he liked being near the seat of Patriot power, he made deals with other ministers to go out and preach in Groton while he preached in their churches close by. For a while, at least, he could coast on his celebrity as Boston’s most silver-tongued minister and recycle his old sermons.

Prof. John Winthrop of Harvard College lived in Cambridge. As the king’s troops marched through town on 18–19 April, he and his wife Hannah fled for safety, first to the Fresh Pond area, then further the next day, fearing the redcoats would return.

Later Hannah Winthrop wrote to her friend Mercy Warren:

Thus with precipitancy were we driven to the town of Andover, following some of our acquaintance, five of us to be conveyd with one poor tired horse & Chaise. . . .

I should not have chose this town for an Asylum, being but 20 miles from Seaports where men of war & their Pirates are Stationed, but in being fixd here I see it is not in man to direct his steps. As you kindly enquire after our Situation, I must tell you it is Rural & romantically pleasing.

Back in Cambridge, militia companies arrived en masse, taking over the college buildings and larger mansions. Most of the townspeople left.

By mid-June, however, the Winthrops were back home, though only temporarily. The professor helped to pack up the Harvard College library and scientific equipment. College classes resumed in Concord in October, and the Winthrops settled there for the rest of the school year.

Adams’s list started with three lawyers, all from Boston. All also had ties of family or friendship to Loyalists, and that complicated their choices as the war broke out.

Benjamin Kent at some point got a pass out of Boston and, according to his profile in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, stayed with various friends in the countryside through the siege. Though he remained in the U.S. of A. through the war, in the mid-1780s he moved to Canada to spend his last years with his children.

William Tudor was just starting his legal career. He was also courting Delia Jarvis, a young lady from a Loyalist family. According to a family memoir, after the fighting started, Tudor tried to wrangle passes for himself, her, and her family from the Adm. Samuel Graves’s secretary, but that effort was fruitless.

On 12 May, Tudor “broke from Boston by the roundabout way of Point Sherly” in Chelsea (now Winthrop), leaving Delia and her family behind. He sought a position in the Patriot service. With John Adams championing him, Tudor became the Continental Army’s judge advocate general in the summer of 1775.

TOMORROW: The legend of Samuel Swift.

“I have lamented excessively the Want of your Correspondence”

In his letter to Abigail Adams on 17 June 1775, which I started quoting yesterday, John Adams continued:

I have never been able to obtain from our Province, any regular and particular Intelligence since I left it. [Benjamin] Kent, [Samuel] Swift, [William] Tudor, Dr. [Samuel] Cooper, Dr. [John] Winthrop, and others wrote me often, last Fall—not a Line from them this Time.

Adams was referring to his time away at the First Continental Congress in late 1774, when he felt well informed.

Three days later, he wrote directly to Tudor:

I have lamented excessively the Want of your Correspondence ever since I have been here. Not a Line from Dr. Winthrop, Dr. Cooper, Mr. Kent, Swift, Tudor, from some or other of whom I was accustomed the last Fall, to receive Letters every Week. I know not the state, the Number, the Officers of the Army—the Condition of the poor People of Boston or any Thing else.

I decided to look into John Adams’s complaint, using the Adams Papers and Founders Online. He and his heirs were unusually conscientious about saving letters, so we’re at least very close to seeing all the correspondence he received.

To begin with, this chiding wasn’t fair to William Tudor (1750–1819, shown here later in life), who was Adams’s former law clerk. All the other men were senior to Adams, so he couldn’t nag them the same way.

Furthermore, back in the fall of 1774, those older gentlemen had actually sent Adams rather few letters. Tudor had sent more than all the other men combined. He’d also traveled to Philadelphia himself, carrying the only letter that Cooper wrote to Adams in that season.

The first two men Adams named were Benjamin Kent (1708–1788) and Samuel Swift (1715–1775), senior figures in the Boston bar. Indeed, Kent had founded the bar association and liked to preside over its get-togethers. Each man had written Adams one letter in the fall of 1774, and Swift had sent another to the whole Massachusetts delegation. Neither wrote Adams in spring 1775.

As I said above, young Tudor had brought Adams a letter from the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper (1725–1783) in October 1774. That minister didn’t send anything in the spring of 1775.

Finally, no 1774 letters to Adams survive from Prof. John Winthrop (1714–1779) of Harvard College. But four days after Adams’s initial complaint on 17 June 1775, Winthrop did send him one. Tudor wrote a few days later. Both men described what had happened on the same date when Adams complained—namely, the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Because while Adams was aching to know how the war was going, all the men he wanted to hear from were actually living in the war zone. They had other things on their minds besides correspondence.

TOMORROW: Getting out of Boston, and getting news from Boston.

An Archive about Commemorating Bunker Hill

The Raab Collection is offering for sale an archive of documents collected by the Bunker-Hill Memorial Association as it built the monument in Charlestown and commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

The Raab Collection webpage says the collection was “assembled in the 1870s” and refers to “George Washington Warren’s binding.” Warren (1813-1883) wrote The History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association in 1877, having been a mayor of Charlestown.

Most of the documents appear to be about promoting and planning the Bunker Hill Monument, even including budget estimates. That stone tower was the project of the generation that came after the Revolutionaries, in many cases literally. The leading voice was William Tudor, Jr., son of the first Judge Advocate General of the Continental Army. The engineer was Loammi Baldwin, Jr., son of the officer who oversaw the northern edge of Boston harbor during the siege.

The association also organized the commemoration of 1825. The Marquis de Lafayette came to Boston to help lay the tower’s cornerstone. Daniel Webster delivered an oration, just as he would nearly two decades later when the stone obelisk was finally finished. Both men are represented in the archive. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison couldn’t come, but they sent letters included here.

The volume includes some first-person accounts of the battle, such as a short statement by Robert Steele about his experience as a provincial drummer:

I Robert Steele of Dedham in the County of Norfolk… Listed 17 days before Bunker Hill fight in Col [Ephraim] Doolittle’s Regiment. After Major Mores [Willard Moore] was wounded, I was ordered down the hill to get some run [rum] to dress his wounds with Benjamin Blood. When we got to the shop the man was down cellar to keep out of the way of the shots which were fired from the gun boats that lay in the river. He asked who was there we told him our errand he then said take whatever you want. We delivered some rum and ran back as soon a possible but before we had time to reach spot they were retreating.

I quoted a longer telling from Steele back here. Note that that letter rendered his companion’s name as Benjamin Ballard, not Benjamin Blood; Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors agrees with the former. The picture of Steele’s letter in the archive show he was also asking for money since he’d lost his pension for not being poor enough.

I’d be pleasantly surprised if there are detailed new accounts from veterans in this collection. Warren’s history and the Raab Collection would no doubt highlight those. Rather, it’s about the effort to memorialize the event.

At least one collection of such accounts did come out the semicentennial event as historians swarmed over the old soldiers who attended. I’ll discuss what happened to that archive in this year’s run of postings on the history and memory of Bunker Hill.

Ripples from the Boston Massacre

Normally around the 5th of March I write about the Boston Massacre, the events that led up to it and its aftermath. But I’ve been recounting a criminal trial from 1785 which is unconnected—or is it?

Several of the figures in that burglary trial have links to the Massacre, showing the small size of pre-industrial Boston and the big impact of the violence on King Street.

Robert Treat Paine, the Massachusetts attorney general in 1785, was a special prosecutor in the Massacre trials. The town of Boston hired him when the royal attorney general, Jonathan Sewall, was looking reluctant.

James Lovell, the victim of the 1784 robbery, was the first man invited by Boston to orate on the Massacre, in April 1771. (Dr. Thomas Young had spoken on the anniversary of the killing at the Manufactory, but that was unofficial. The town took up the idea and ran with it until 1783.)

Defense attorney William Tudor was one of John Adams’s clerks during the Massacre trials. He delivered the anniversary oration in 1779.

Bartholomew Broaders was an elected constable in 1784 who helped to investigate the burglary. Back in 1770, he was one of the barber’s apprentices who got into an argument with Pvt. Hugh White in front of the Customs office, the incident that ballooned into the shooting.

Archibald McNeal, a witness to the burglary in 1784, might also have been a witness to the events of 1770. An Archibald McNeil, Jr., testified for the town report:

that on Saturday the third instant, about half an hour after four in the afternoon, the deponent with two apprentices were spinning at the lower end of Mr. McNeil’s ropewalk, three stout grenadiers, armed with bludgeons, came to them, and addressing the deponent said, You damn’d dogs, don’t you deserve to be kill’d? Are you fit to die?

However, there was at least one other Archibald McNeal in pre-Revolutionary Boston, a baker who evacuated with the British troops in 1776, so this may not be the same man.

As for shopkeeper John Fullerton, also burglarized in 1784, he was one of the victims of the Great Fire of 1760. (Yes, I’ll get back to that story, too.)

A Trial till Half Past One in the Morning

On 3 Mar 1785, the state of Massachusetts brought Thomas Archibald and William Scott to trial for burglarizing the home of James Lovell, a former Continental Congress delegate. Although the burglars took cash, it looks like Lovell was most upset about losing some Continental loan certificates.

The trial took place in the state’s top court. Chief Justice William Cushing, later a U.S. Supreme Court justice, presided. The prosecutor was attorney general Robert Treat Paine, another former Continental Congress delegate.

The court appointed lawyers for the defendants, who had few connections in town and little money. (Another early example of the tenet that people accused of serious crimes deserve strong legal representation, even if the job might be distasteful.)

It’s possible that each man had his own defense attorney. One was William Tudor, a former clerk of John Adams and the first judge advocate general of the Continental Army.

The other was John Silvester Gardiner (1737-1793), who had quite an interesting career. He was born in Boston, son of the prominent surgeon and apothecary Silvester Gardiner. He went to Scotland for schooling and then built a legal career in London, Wales, St. Kitts, and Paris before returning to Boston in 1783. His father was still exiled from Massachusetts as a Loyalist, but John S. Gardiner was fine with that since they didn’t get along.

Gardiner quickly became one of Boston’s leading attorneys, but he practiced for only a couple of years before souring on the local bar. In 1786 he moved again, to land he inherited in Maine. Soon he won a seat in the Massachusetts General Court and used that as his platform for advocating favorite causes: reforming state law, legalizing theater, making Maine a separate state. He was also influential in turning King’s Chapel Unitarian. In The Gardiners of Massachusetts, T. A. Milford summed up the man’s career (on page 1, yet) by writing, “Gardiner was a pest.”

At the trial, the prosecution’s witnesses told the story I summarized over the last two days. The crucial testimony came from Nero Faneuil, saying he was Archibald and Scott’s accomplice turned state’s evidence.

Then came witnesses for the prisoners—or rather for Scott. Archibald doesn’t seem to have put up much of a defense. Scott and his attorney tried to make the case that he was sleeping somewhere else during the crime. Hannah Nelson testified, “I have seen Scot the Tuesday night before thanksgiving he came to our house lodged all Night.” She recalled giving birth around that time, but couldn’t specify the day. Sarah Bond corroborated Scott’s visit, but then another witness, Abigail Willet, testified that “Sally Bond [had] bad Character.”

The result was a flimsy alibi. Imaginatively, one of the defense attorneys argued, “Mrs. Nelson might have Cook’d up a Story for both as well as one”—i.e., if she was just making up a thin story to save Scott from conviction, why didn’t she claim that both men had been at her house?

Another defense argument was “no part of the Property found on any but Nero,” and “Was it not strange that Nero should be trusted with the money”? In other words, Faneuil might be lying to cast blame on Archibald and Scott. Gardiner might have tried to make that personal; Paine’s notes on the case include the line, “I have known these blks., no credit to be given to them.”

In the end, both Tudor and Gardiner fell back on the position that any doubt in the prosecution’s case should lead the jury to acquit the two defendants, or at least lead the judges to spare them from the death penalty.

According to Paine’s diary, the “Trial ended 1/2 past 1 next morning.” The jury returned a verdict of guilty on capital counts for both Archibald and Scott.

On 9 March, the justices sentenced the two men to hang. The execution finally took place on 5 May. The Massachusetts Spy reported: “They had heretofore behaved in a manner unbecoming their unhappy condition, but on that morning appeared penitent, and suitably affected with their situation.”

What about Nero Faneuil, whose got me into this story? As described back here, he pled guilty to a different robbery and been bound to work for the victim for seven years, or until 1792. He may not have outlived that sentence. Town records show that on 29 July 1792, the Rev. Thomas Baldwin of the Second Baptist Meeting married Flora Fanniel to Magguam Eben.

Orations at Old South, 21 Mar.

On Wednesday, 21 March, the Old South Meeting House will host “Speak Out!”, its fourth annual remembrance of the Boston Massacre orations.

From 1771 to 1783, Boston had a yearly town meeting to commemorate the fatal violence on King Street. The tradition was started by Dr. Thomas Young speaking at the Manufactory on 5 Mar 1770, and the town’s politicians decided the event was successful enough to make it an official occasion, not just a speech by a radical who wasn’t even from around here.

That year the town had assistant schoolmaster James Lovell speak in April. From then on, the orations were always on 5 March or, if that date fell on a Sunday, 6 March. The invited orator was usually a rising young politician. In order:

• Dr. Joseph Warren
• Dr. Benjamin Church (after John Adams declined)
• John Hancock
• Dr. Warren again 
• Rev. Peter Thacher (speaking in Watertown since Boston was besieged)
• Benjamin Hichborn
• Jonathan Williams Austin
• William Tudor 
• Jonathan Mason, Jr.
• Thomas Dawes, Jr. 
• George Richards Minot
• Dr. Thomas Welsh 

In 1783 Boston decided that remembering the Massacre was less vital now that Massachusetts was independent, and the town shifted its annual patriotic oration to the Fourth of July.

The Old South event focuses on the orations leading up to the war. The description says:

Join us to hear selected excerpts of these speeches, performed by an inter-generational group in the grand hall where the orations took place 240 years ago! Learn about the orations and their significance with special guests Bostonian Society Executive Director Nathaniel Sheidley, historian Robert Allison, and Dr. Joseph Warren biographer Dr. Samuel Forman. Audience members will also have the option to read from a selection of excerpts; prizes will be awarded to the most rousing orators in youth and adult categories!

This free event is co-sponsored by the History Department at Suffolk University, the Bostonian Society, and the Boston Public Schools’ Department of History and Social Studies.

All are welcome, but Old South asks people to please register in advance. The speeches start at 6:00 P.M. If the weather is bad, the event might be postponed for a week until 28 March.

ADDENDUM: This event has now been rescheduled for 28 March.

Samuel Gerrish “unworthy an Officer”

As I described yesterday, Col. Samuel Gerrish of Newbury was the first infantry officer to receive a Massachusetts commission in May 1775, but then ran out his string with a series of embarrassing actions and lack of action.

On 17 August, the Continental Army court-martialed Gerrish on the charge “That he behaved unworthy an Officer.” With Gen. Nathanael Greene presiding, a panel of officers found him guilty and ordered him “to be cashiered, and render’d incapable of any employment in the American Army.” Gen. George Washington approved that sentence on 19 August.

Washington’s private letters show that he was pleased with that outcome and, whatever incident was behind the formal charge, linked it to Gerrish’s behavior at Bunker Hill. To his overseer Lund Washington the commander wrote:

The People of this Government have obtained a Character which they by no means deserved—their Officers generally speaking are the most indifferent kind of People I ever saw. I have already broke one Colo. and five Captain’s for Cowardice, & for drawing more Pay & Provision’s than they had Men in their Companies. . . .

in short they are by no means such Troops, in any respect, as you are led to believe of them from the Accts which are published, but I need not make myself Enemies among them, by this declaration, although it is consistent with truth. I daresay the Men would fight very well (if properly Officered) although they are an exceeding dirty & nasty people. had they been properly conducted at Bunkers Hill (on the 17th of June) or those that were there properly supported, the Regulars would have met with a shameful defeat; & a much more considerable loss than they did. . .

it was for their behaviour on that occasion that the above Officers were broke, for I never spared one that was accused of Cowardice but brot ’em to immediate Tryal.

Likewise he told Richard Henry Lee that he “Broke one Colo. and two Captains for Cowardly behaviour in the action on Bunker’s Hill.” Gen. William Heath later told John Adams that Gerrish’s fault had been “Backwardness in Duty on the 17th. of June.”

According to Swett, judge advocate general William Tudor later said that Gerrish “was treated far too severely.” (At the time, however, Tudor’s main complaint to his mentor John Adams was that the courts-martial were unfair to him because of all the work he had to do.)

Samuel Gerrish went back to Newbury. Loammi Baldwin took over the leadership of the regiment. However, not everyone had lost respect for Gerrish since his town elected him to the Massachusetts General Court the next year.

“Poor Mrs Brown, who was Betsy Otis”

James Otis’s 1783 will didn’t exactly brim with love for his oldest child, Elizabeth, who toward the end of the siege of Boston had married a British army officer, Leonard Brown.

As I quoted yesterday, Otis wrote that he’d heard his daughter’s husband had left her, and that she was suffering from consumption, and then he bequeathed her five shillings. And that was supposed to be in a moment of sanity.

I haven’t found any indication that those rumors were true. Elizabeth Brown lived for decades. And while I can’t confirm the Browns lived together happily, they remained a couple.

In October 1785, after John Adams became the U.S. of A.’s minister to Britain, Elizabeth Brown contacted him, saying, “my Comp[limen]ts: attend Mrs: Adams and inform her I still retain a pleasing remembrance of the agreeable Week I pass’d with her at Plymouth.” She said that she was living “at Leonard Browns Esqr. Sleaford Lincolnshire”—probably her father-in-law’s house.

The biggest problem Elizabeth Brown faced then was not the lack of money from her father but lack of access to bequests from other relatives. Two months later Brown laid out her difficulty for Adams:

my Grandfather at the Decease of my much’d Hond: Father Bequeath’d me one Thousand pound Lawfull Money which his Executors M: J— and Mr: A— Otis were to pay me, and I expected to receive the interest. untill it was convenient to them, to pay the principal

“M: J— and Mr: A— Otis” were Brown’s uncles Joseph Otis and Samuel Allyne Otis. Her uncle by marriage, James Warren, was supposed to be her attorney in Massachusetts, receiving and passing on the money. But the Otises’ business had failed in the tough postwar American economy, so they didn’t have any cash to send. And Warren wasn’t representing Elizabeth Brown’s interests well.

In May 1786, Abigail Adams wrote from London to her sister Mary Cranch about the case:

Poor Mrs Brown, who was Betsy Otis, had all her Grandfather left her, in the Hands of Mr Allen otis and Genll Warren. She has written several Letters to mr Adams upon the subject requesting his advice what to do. Her Father left her nothing. It is very hard she Should lose what her Grandfather left her.

The case hung on. In 1789, Elizabeth’s mother, Ruth Otis, died, leaving her more wealth.

Finally, in February 1790 the Massachusetts legislature passed a law allowing “Leonard Brown and his Wife” to take possession of land belonging to Samuel Allyne Otis as he went through bankruptcy and to sell it to satisfy a debt to them. The attorneys in that settlement were Harrison Gray Otis, Otis’s son, and William Tudor, Adams’s former clerk and father of James Otis’s future biographer.

According to William Tudor, Jr., Elizabeth Brown made “a short visit in 1792” to Massachusetts, perhaps to wrap up those bequests. He also wrote that her husband, “coming into possession of a handsome property, resigned his commission” in the army and retired to a genteel life in the British countryside. That might have been in 1796, when the Monthly Magazine reported the death “At Sleaford, aged 82, Leonard Brown, esq. of Pinchbeck, for many years a magistrate for the district of Kesteven.”

As I wrote yesterday, St. Mary’s church in Pinchbeck contains an inscription about the death of Capt. Brown in 1821. Tudor wrote that Elizabeth Brown was still alive at that time. According to Lincolnshire Pedigrees (which names her father as “Thomas Otis of Boston”), Elizabeth Brown died 18 Apr 1839 at age eighty-two.

That same genealogical book says that Elizabeth and Leonard Brown had a son, also named Leonard, born around 1777. He lived until 1848 and was survived by his widow, Anne. I found gossip about them in Letters of James Savage to His Family, privately printed in 1906. Savage was a genealogist, and in 1842 he went to Britain, determined to track down James Otis’s descendants. Writing from the other Boston, he told his wife what he’d heard about this Leonard Brown: “he was domineered over by his mother, after father’s death, and had only within a short time married his housekeeper or cook, and had no children.” And that was the end of that branch of the Otis family.

Wire-Worker Adams at Boston’s Last Town Meetings

The wire-worker Samuel Adams was a prominent character in nineteenth-century Boston, as Kathryn Griffith described in her recent profile for the Bostonian Society.

He started the century as town crier before going into the business of manufacturing screens and other wire objects. Later he became an indefatigable voice on the political left.

In 1884 James Mascarene Hubbard delivered a paper to the Bostonian Society about Boston’s transition from town to city in the early 1820s. His description of a town meeting in Faneuil Hall over the turn of the year 1822 offers glimpses of this Samuel Adams, as filtered through the Daily Advertiser:

[On whether to relabel Boston as a city.] Finally a hearing was obtained for Mr. Samuel Adams, wire-worker, that is, a maker of rat-traps, and late town-crier, who made a characteristic speech amid malicious “cries of Louder” although the orator appeared to labor excessively at his lungs. His opening words were, “Fellow citizens, you must consider me as on the brink of an eternal world,“ [Adams was then in his early sixties, but he would live three more decades] and the burden of his speech was, “Names is nothing. Only let us have Boston, and I care not what you call it.” Later on in the debate, which from this time took a more serious turn, he “rose and moved that the word ‘Boston’ be added to the word ‘city,’” to the great merriment of the assembly. . . .

[On what to call the new city’s top official.] Mr. Adams made a fresh appearance in the character of a New England Dogberry. “He was opposed to the term Mayor. A mare is a horse, and he had as lief be called a horse or an ass as a mare. He preferred the name President. There was dignity in the sound. He should count it an honor to be called President, but had he the wisdom of Solomon and the riches of the East, he would not accept the office to be called a Mare.” . . .

[On whether to hold elections in the neighborhoods or at Faneuil Hall.] As the irrepressible Adams puts it: “Many persons can’t attend here. For instance a journeyman who is in your employ. They feel so delicate in your employ, they are afraid of offending you. They are the sinners [sinews] of the State.” . . .

On the clause authorizing the City Council to sell or lease the property of the city,…Mr. Adams [was heard] to say, among other things, that “a new set of men might get together under the capacity of selling city property.” . . .

Our final quotation shall be from a speech by Mr. Adams, whose office as Town-crier seems to have given him a power and persistence of lungs which no cries of “Question” could overcome. “I would examine the act,” he exclaimed; “Like David of old, I would not give sleep to my eyes nor slumber to my eyelids until I had pondered it well. I have done it, have lain awake all night ruminating on these here things.”

Hubbard suggested that Adams belonged in a group he called ”mushroom town-meeting orators, and weak heads.” He showed more respect for upper-class figures, including such men as Benjamin Russell, William Tudor, James T. Austin, future mayor Josiah Quincy, and S. A. Wells, descendant and biographer of the other Samuel Adams.

Boston’s business elite had been pushing to incorporate the town as a city like New York since the early 1700s. The populace had long pushed back, preferring the town-meeting form of government, which didn’t turn over power to just a few elected men.

Wire-worker Adams appears to have been suspicious about concentrating power, to judge by his support for neighborhood elections and poorly expressed worry about a conspiracy to sell public property. But he also seems to have been fairly resigned to the change. Boston had grown to more than 40,000 people, nearly three times its size when he was a boy, and a city charter may have seemed necessary.

Ironically, by 1835 the term “wire-worker“ became a synonym for “wire-puller”—someone who manipulated politics or government from behind the scenes. Samuel Adams was a real wire-worker, and he never seems to have held significant power, despite all his efforts.

TOMORROW: What did this Samuel Adams do in the Revolution?

A Love Story at the A.A.S., 22 Oct.

Yesterday I quoted an anecdote from The Life of James Otis, published by William Tudor, Jr., in 1823. It described a young woman in Boston offering succor to British soldiers wounded at the Battle of Bunker Hill, causing them to assume wrongly that she supported the cause they were fighting for.

That story stuck with me, but I didn’t expect to find out who the unnamed young woman was. Last week I learned from books published by later generations of the same family that the woman was William Tudor, Jr.’s own mother, then Delia Jarvis.

And there turned out to be another detail Tudor had kept out of his 1823 book: Delia Jarvis was from a Loyalist family. Her later descendants were open, even celebratory, about that detail at the end of the 1800s. They said that Jarvis had insisted on hosting a tea party even after the beverage had become political anathema. They reported that her future husband addressed her in letters as “my fair loyalist.”

The senior William Tudor was joking a bit, signing himself “your faithful rebel” while working as the Continental Army’s first judge advocate general. He eventually won his bride over to his political side, the family said. But the couple’s son hadn’t suggested any split loyalties for her in 1823, when public feelings about Loyalists might still have been raw.

On Tuesday, 22 October, the American Antiquarian Society will host a talk on those love letters between William Tudor and Delia Jarvis. Mary C. Kelley will speak on “‘While Pen, Ink & Paper Can Be Had’: Reading and Writing in a Time of Revolution”:

Instead of the typical focus on the famed trio of Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin, this lecture looks at the American Revolution through the eyes of two relatively unknown individuals. A son and a daughter of families who counted themselves members of Boston’s elite, William Tudor, who served in the Continental Army, and Delia Jarvis, a Loyalist whom he was courting, forged their relationship in a world of divisive turmoil and radical change. A remarkably rich transatlantic literary culture that remained intact in an increasingly embattled world served as their vehicle. This program will explore not only the letters and the lives of Tudor and Jarvis, but also the fiction and poetry on which these individuals relied as they navigated their way through the momentous events of the struggle for independence.

Tudor was one of John Adams’s law clerks during the Boston Massacre trial. After his military service he took on Massachusetts state offices and hosted the meeting that founded the Massachusetts Historical Society, which now holds those letters.

Kelley is the Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She’s written and edited books on the Beecher sisters, Margaret Fuller, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and other nineteenth-century American women. Her paper on the Tudor-Jarvis correspondence appeared in Early American Studies.

Kelley’s talk is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M. It’s free and open to the public.

(The image above shows a portrait of Delia Tudor auctioned by Sotheby’s in 2005. It was painted by John Wesley Jarvis, a British-born portraitist who doesn’t seem to have been a close relation to the sitter.)

Delia Jarvis and the Battle of Bunker Hill

In The Life of James Otis, of Massachusetts (1823), William Tudor, Jr., included this anecdote about the Battle of Bunker Hill in a footnote:

The anxiety and various emotions of the people of Boston, on this occasion, had a highly dramatic kind of interest. Those who sided with the British troops began to see even in the duration of this battle, the possibility that they had taken the wrong side, and that they might become exiles from their country. While those whose whole soul was with their countrymen, were in dreadful apprehension for their friends, in a contest, the severity of which was shewn by the destruction of so many of their enemies.

After the battle had continued for some time, a young person living in Boston, possessed of very keen and generous feelings, bordering a little perhaps on the romantic, as was natural to her age, sex, and lively imagination, finding that many of the wounded troops brought over from the field of action were carried by her residence, mixed a quantity of refreshing beverage, and with a female domestic by her side, stood at the door and offered it to the sufferers as they were borne along, burning with fever and parched with thirst.

Several of them grateful for the kindness, gave her, as they thought, consolation, by assuring her of the destruction of her countrymen. One young officer said, “never mind it my brave young lady, we have peppered ’em well, depend upon it.” Her dearest feelings, deeply interested in the opposite camp, were thus unintentionally lacerated, while she was pouring oil and wine into their wounds.

This week I came across more versions of that anecdote which reveal that the “young person living in Boston” was Tudor’s own mother. A granddaughter later wrote that said she had not just given drink to the soldiers but also “had them brought in and attended and comforted as best she could.”

All the while, this young woman, born Delia Jarvis, was reportedly worrying for her future husband, the young lawyer William Tudor, who was with the provincial army. Delia Tudor would outlive her husband and son and see the Bunker Hill Monument dedicated in 1843.

According to the introductory material in Deacon Tudor’s Diary (1896), yet another book published by the same family, the “refreshing beverage” that Jarvis gave to the soldiers was tea. I wouldn’t have guessed that from the description.

TOMORROW: Another detail left out of the 1823 anecdote.

(The picture above is one of several from the late 1800s that show Bostonians anxiously watching the Battle of Bunker Hill across the Charles River. This example appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1875 and comes courtesy of the Boston Public Library and Wikipedia.)

David Library’s “Letters from the Front”

The David Library of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania is blogging some items from its collection transcribed and collected as “Letters from the Front.” (Not all items are tagged that way yet, hence the list below.)

Several of the documents so far are letters from Col. Jedidiah Huntington (1743-1818, shown here courtesy of the Huntington Family Association) to his father, Connecticut militia general Jabez Huntington, during the siege of Boston. But there are some other familiar names as well.

• Introduction from scholar Will Tatum.
• Dr. Samuel Adams to Samuel Adams, 7 Feb 1775.
• William Coit on Bunker Hull, June 1775.
• William Tudor to Stephen Collins, 27 Sept 1775.
• Charles Lee to Alexander MacDougall, 26 Oct 1775.
• Huntington, 11 Nov 1775.
• Isaac Sears to the Connecticut delegates to the Congress, 28 Nov 1775.
• Huntington, 4 Dec 1775.
• Huntington, 25 Dec 1775.
• Huntington, 18 Jan 1776.
• Dr. Samuel Adams to Sally Preston, 10 Mar 1776.

Just to make things interesting, there were two physicians named Samuel Adams in the Continental Army in 1775-76. The son of the Boston Patriot organizer, born in 1751, was assigned to the hospital in Cambridge.

The Dr. Samuel Adams one who wrote the two letters listed above was born in Connecticut in 1745 and practiced on Cape Cod. He joined the provincial army as surgeon for Col. John Fellows’s regiment, and in 1776 was assigned to the 18th Continental under Col. Edmund Phinney. He was a widower, having lost his wife and their first child in 1765. Sally Preston became his second wife.

The David Library will undoubtedly post more letters, following the front as it moves away from Boston.

John Adams Sums Up

As I described yesterday, John Adams didn’t like how William Wirt’s 1817 biography of Patrick Henry gave the Virginian credit for sparking the American Revolution. Adams wanted Massachusetts to get the credit for being first.

The only problem was that Henry really did deliver incendiary remarks against the Stamp Act in the Virginia House of Burgesses on 29 May 1765. Wirt’s version of that speech ended, “If this be treason, make the most of it!” That may not be accurate, but there was no doubt that Henry attacked the Stamp Act months before Boston’s big public protests in August.

So the only way for Adams to win back Massachusetts’s primary role was to argue that the Revolutionary conflict had begun even earlier than that—with the writs of assistance case in 1761. On 29 Mar 1818 Adams sent his former law clerk William Tudor a long, detailed, and dramatic—at times melodramatic—description of the case, ending:

But [James] Otis was a flame of Fire! With a promptitude of classical allusions, a depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events and dates, a profusion of legal authorities, a prophetic glare of his eyes into futurity, and a rapid torrent of impetuous eloquence he hurried away all before him.

American independence was then and there born. The seeds of patriots and heroes to defend the Non Sine Diis Animosus Infans; to defend the vigorous youth were then and there sown. Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born. In fifteen years, i.e. in 1776, he grew up to manhood and declared himself free.

Adams allowed that letter to be published in newspapers and a new collection of his “Novanglus” essays, thus making it available to historians just as the fiftieth anniversary of independence approached.

In March 1818 the North American Review printed young Jared Sparks’s critique of Wirt’s Patrick Henry, saying it relied too much on “tradition” instead of “truth.” The article listed several ways that Massachusetts instigated the Revolution. (That magazine was, after all, based in Boston.) Sparks went on to edit the first collection of George Washington’s writings.

Over the next couple of years Adams convinced the editor of that magazine, William Tudor, Jr., to write the biography of Otis that he had imagined. The Life of James Otis, of Massachusetts appeared in 1823, quoting heavily from Adams’s letters to the author’s father.

Thus, before he died on 4 July 1826, John Adams had managed to establish a historiography of the American Revolution that starts in Boston in 1761, with James Otis, Jr., delivering the opening speech. Or was that, as Adams had complained about Wirt’s book, largely “a romance”?

James Otis, Jr., on Taxation Without Representation

Until 2 Nov 2005, the phrase “taxation without representation” has almost always been credited to the Boston lawyer and legislator James Otis, Jr. The basis for this attribution is John Adams’s recollection of how Otis argued the writs of assistance case in 1761, in a letter to Otis’s biographer William Tudor, Jr., in 1818. After quoting that letter at length Tudor wrote:

From the navigation act the advocate [Otis] passed to the Acts of Trade, and these, he contended, imposed taxes, enormous, burthensome, intolerable taxes; and on this topic he gave full scope to his talent, for powerful declamation and invective, against the tyranny of taxation without representation.

From the energy with which he urged this position, that taxation without representation is tyranny, it came to be a common maxim in the mouth of every one. And with him it formed the basis of all his speeches and political writings; he builds all his opposition to arbitrary measures from this foundation, and perpetually recurs to it through his whole career, as the great constitutional theme of liberty, and as the fundamental principle of all opposition to arbitrary power.

However, neither Adams’s contemporaneous notes on what he’d heard in 1761 nor his letter contained the “taxation without representation” phrase or argument. We know he was urging Tudor to write about Otis as a way to capture some of the attention that William Wirt’s romanticized biography had brought to Patrick Henry of Virginia. Adams and Tudor had strong motives to present Otis, a Massachusetts man, as the first to establish the fundamental political conflict of the Revolution.

And in fact Otis did so—even if he didn’t use the words we remember. In his 1764 pamphlet The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (extensive extracts here), Otis concluded:

The sum of my argument is: that civil government is of God; that the administrators of it were originally the whole people; that they might have devolved it on whom they pleased; that this devolution is fiduciary, for the good of the whole; that by the British constitution this devolution is on the King, Lords and Commons, the supreme, sacred and uncontrollable legislative power not only in the realm but through the dominions; that by the abdication, the original compact was broken to pieces; that by the Revolution it was renewed and more firmly established, and the rights and liberties of the subject in all parts of the dominions more fully explained and confirmed; that in consequence of this establishment and the acts of succession and union, His Majesty GEORGE III is rightful King and sovereign, and, with his Parliament, the supreme legislative of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging; that this constitution is the most free one and by far the best now existing on earth; that by this constitution every man in the dominions is a free man; that no parts of His Majesty’s dominions can be taxed without their consent; that every part has a right to be represented in the supreme or some subordinate legislature; that the refusal of this would seem to be a contradiction in practice to the theory of the constitution; that the colonies are subordinate dominions and are now in such a state as to make it best for the good of the whole that they should not only be continued in the enjoyment of subordinate legislation but be also represented in some proportion to their number and estates in the grand legislature of the nation; that this would firmly unite all parts of the British empire in the greater peace and prosperity, and render it invulnerable and perpetual.

In case you missed it within that magnificent 311-word sentence, Otis wrote: “that no parts of His Majesty’s dominions can be taxed without their consent; that every part has a right to be represented in the supreme or some subordinate legislature;...”

So James Otis certainly focused on the idea that the Parliament in London couldn’t lay taxes (or Customs duties) on American colonists because that legislature didn’t represent those colonists, that the only legislatures which could impose such taxes were those the colonists elected according to their charters. But Otis didn’t phrase his argument in rhyme.

TOMORROW: So did any Americans in the Revolutionary era use the phrase “taxation without representation”?

Misremembering the Massacre in 1823

In 1823, William Tudor, Jr., wrote The Life of James Otis, of Massachusetts, the first major biography of a figure from Boston’s pre-Revolutionary political turmoil. This is what that book had to say about the Boston Massacre:

The presence of the troops in Boston had now produced one of the effects, which had been foretold by those persons, who had deprecated their being sent to the country. The feelings of reserve and ill-will towards the army, which pervaded the whole community, often led to quarrels and fighting between the soldiers and some of the labouring classes.

The troops behaved well generally, though in many instances individuals were insulted by them, and some few cases of outrage and wounding unarmed persons occurred. Yet in looking at the chronicles of those days, where no event of this kind was either omitted or palliated, they seem to have been under good discipline, and to have demeaned themselves as well as could have been expected, when it is remembered, that they were quartered among a people who always met them with aversion.

At length a quarrel arose, from an insulting answer given by a black man to a soldier. A battle ensued, in which the soldier after beating the negro, was, for an insolent answer to the fellow’s master, beaten himself in turn. Afterwards, when several of his comrades engaged in the dispute, they were also worsted, and being bent on revenge, they reinforced their numbers to renew the struggle on another day, which was promptly followed by the people, till the whole town became agitated by the disturbance.

In this state of things, a dispute occurred between the guards stationed in State-street [then King Street], and some men and boys to the number of eighty or a hundred, who had assembled in the street. A sergeant’s guard, in passing to relieve a centinel at the custom house, pushed or struck some of the people with their muskets, and immediately they began to pelt them with snow balls, stones, or any missiles they could find. Captain Preston was in command of the guard, and he directed the soldiers to fire in self defence. About eighteen or twenty were killed and wounded.

It’s remarkable how inaccurate this account was, considering that some Bostonians alive in 1823 could still remember the event. Furthermore, Tudor had access to important sources. His father had been one of John Adams’s law clerks in 1770. Adams himself was urging the young man to write about Otis and sending him reminiscences. Those circumstances suggest that this was how Tudor and his circle wanted to remember the Massacre.

Among the inaccuracies:

• The fight at John Gray’s ropewalk did not start because of “an insulting answer given by a black man to a soldier.” It started because of an insulting answer given by a white man to a solider. We even know that white man’s name: William Green. Tudor’s account shifted the blame for the ruckus to a black man with a “master,” absolving the free white population of causing any trouble.
• Saying that “A sergeant’s guard [was] passing to relieve a centinel at the custom house” implies that those soldiers just happened by King Street in their regular march through the town when one sentry replaced another. Cpl. William Wemms and his squad of grenadier privates came to the Customs office because Pvt. Hugh White, the sentry there, had sent a man running for reinforcements. That squad didn’t make any friends by how they arrived, pushing and pricking people with their bayonets. But White thought the crowd was already violent.
• Capt. Thomas Preston didn’t order the soldiers to fire in self-defense. His attorneys—Adams, Robert Auchmuty, and Josiah Quincy, Jr.—made the case that he had never given such orders. Indeed, one of the privates, Edward Montgomery, later told one of those lawyers (most likely Auchmuty) that he had been the man who yelled, “Fire!”
  
• There were five Bostonians killed, six if we count Christopher Monk, who died years later after suffering a crippling injury. The first newspaper accounts listed five more as wounded. Eleven is a long way from “eighteen or twenty” victims.

For nearly twenty years after the Massacre, Boston commissioned a public oration each 5th of March to commemorate the event. That tradition faded after Massachusetts adopted the Constitution, to be replaced by an oration on the 4th of July. This passage from Tudor’s book shows how much Bostonians then forgot about the Massacre in the next thirty-five years.

Militiamen Rise Up Against Gen. Gage—in 1774

Yesterday’s posting described how on 1 Sept 1774 Gen. Thomas Gage, using his authority as governor of Massachusetts, ordered British soldiers to empty the provincial gunpowder storehouse in Charlestown (a part that’s now Somerville) and collect two small brass cannons from the militia in Cambridge.

Local people noticed. (It’s hard for over 200 redcoated soldiers to roll cannons and gunpowder wagons through a town without people noticing.) They started asking questions. And then, according to merchant John Andrews, this happened in Boston:

The Governor walking up the main street to dine with Brigadier [Robert] Pigot of the 43d, who improves a house just above Liberty tree, by chance or design, in pulling out his handkerchief, dropt a letter from Brigadier [William] Brattle of Cambridge

Andrews thought Gage deliberately dropped that letter “to exculpate himself from being thought to take such a measure of his own head”—i.e., to let people know that he’d acted only after a note from Brattle, their own militia general (shown above). Some historians have suggested that a Whig stole this note and made up a cover story about it falling from Gage’s pocket. And, of course, the general could truly have lost it by accident.

In any event, Cambridge quickly learned what Brattle had done. On 2 September, Andrews wrote that the people of that town “did not fail to visit Brattle and [Attorney General Jonathan] Sewall’s house last evening, but not finding either of ’em at home, they quietly went off.” Actually, these local crowds made a lot of noise, broke windows, and then went off. Even before they came, Brattle had hurried into Boston and taken refuge in the army camp, knowing how upset his neighbors would be.

And that was just the beginning of the provincial reaction. As word of the removal of the powder and cannons spread out from Cambridge, the rumors became more dire. Eventually people were hearing that the army had attacked a crowd of people, set fire to the town. (Which town? Rumors disagreed.) Men mustered in their militia companies and marched toward Charlestown.

That was how the militia system was supposed to work in a world before electronic communication. A military emergency allowed no time to wait for commanders to gather, confer, and bring back orders. The companies in each town prepared themselves to march to where it seemed they were needed.

And they marched with notable speed. Andrews later wrote:

Though they had an account at Marlborough of the powder’s being remov’d, last Thursday night, yet they were down to Cambridge (which is thirty miles) by eight o’clock Fryday morning, with a troop of horse and another of foot.

These two companies from Marlborough joined a crowd of 3,000, then 4,000 men from Middlesex County massing on Cambridge common early on 2 September. The town itself contained only 1,582 people according to the census of 1765. The militiamen had stacked their muskets somewhere along the way when it became clear that there was no imminent danger. Nevertheless, their numbers were enough to intimidate anyone in Cambridge who supported Gen. Gage’s actions. Even Boston’s Patriot leaders—men like Dr. Joseph Warren, Dr. Thomas Young, and town clerk William Cooper—were alarmed by this crowd, and hurried out to Cambridge to urge the crowd not to do anything violent or rash.

The government in London had appointed three Cambridge gentlemen to the new Council under the Massachusetts Government Act: Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver, Samuel Danforth, and Joseph Lee. The crowd insisted that all three publicly resign their seats, and they did. Sheriff David Phipps had to apologize for helping the army remove the powder and cannons, and promise not to enforce as writs under the new act. By that evening Attorney General Sewall and Lt. Gov. Oliver joined Brattle in Boston, and over the next couple of weeks most other Loyalist families in Cambridge left their homes as well.

That night, William Tudor of Boston wrote in his diary: “at 5 P.m. came on hard Thunder & Lightning with a great Shower.” And the next morning: “It Rain’d plentifully all last Night.” The storm encouraged the crowd to disperse and return to their homes. But those militiamen had already shown Gen. Gage, the province’s Whig activists, and themselves that they would oppose any further changes to their ability to defend or govern themselves. On 2 Sept 1774, months before the Battle of Lexington and Concord, it was also clear that the royal government’s power no longer extended farther than the gates of Boston.