“Subscribers towards Mr. Adams’s debt”

In 1860 the New England Historical and Genealogical Register published the text of an undated document headed “Copy of original list of subscribers toward Mr. Adams’s debt.”

The author of the surrounding article, Andrew H. Ward, believed that debt was one Samuel Adams had inherited from his father’s investment in the Massachusetts Land Bank.

The journal’s editor cast doubt on that idea in a footnote, noting that the presence of “Rev Mr Bowen” on the list must mean it dated between 1766, when Penuel Bowen was ordained at the New South Meeting-House, and 1772, when he left the pulpit and opened a provisions store. That period was long after the estate of Adams’s father was settled.

Another subscriber on the list was “A gentleman of distinction,” and Ward’s footnote said someone had inserted “Mr. T——e” above that. That probably meant Customs Commissioner John Temple. He left Boston in late 1770, further narrowing the span of possible dates.

Kay Menand’s Massachusetts Historical Review article “The Things That Were Caesar’s: Tax Collecting in Eighteenth-Century Boston” reports that in March 1768 the appeals court ordered Adams to pay the town £1,463, and that judgement was satisfied. However, as noted yesterday, in 1772 a Boston town committee found that Adams still owed £1,149.10.0.1/4 of uncollected taxes, money that the town was unlikely ever to see.

Putting all the clues together, I think this list probably dates from the late 1760s. We don’t know if all the subscribers paid what they promised, so we can’t make the sums add up. Even so, it’s an interesting snapshot of people willing to help out Adams and/or Boston.

The top subscriber by far, pledging more than four times as much as any other individual, was John Hancock. At this point he was still firmly at Adams’s side.

The next tier of donors (£60+) consisted of John Erving, James Pitts, and James Bowdoin, wealthy merchants who often served on the Council. Erving was close to the royal establishment, but unlike his sons (including George, pledging £12), he stayed in America after the siege.

Likewise, John Gray the ropemaker (£40), Nathaniel Sparhawk the Maine landowner (£40), and Harrison Gray the provincial treasurer (£20) all leaned toward the Crown in the 1760s while maintaining friendships among the Whigs. Moses Gill (£26.13) was a solid Whig.

Among the smaller donors, Dr. Joseph Warren (£13.6) stands out as a young professional among older, established, and wealthier merchants. William Whitwell (£6) is notable because he led the 1772 inquiry into Adams’s outstanding debt with Thomas Dawes (£13) on his committee. Future Loyalist Isaac Royall offered the smallest amount of any name on the list, a mere £1.8.

This list appears to date from a period before the province’s political dividing lines hardened. Men who opposed Samuel Adams’s tactics were nonetheless willing to help bleach a blot on his reputation—with the knowledge that their money wasn’t going to him personally but to their town.

TOMORROW: The elections of 1772.

“Remaining unpaid of Mr. Adams Debt to the Town”

A couple of days ago I recounted how in March 1771 the Boston town meeting appointed the merchant William Whitwell and four other men to look into the town’s finances.

That committee finally reported on its inquiry on 9 Mar 1772. Among its conclusions was:

We also find that there still remains to be paid into the Province Treasury on Account of Mr. Samuel Adams the Sum of Fifty Pounds and from the information given us by Mr. Robert Peirpoint it appears that there is no probability of any part of the Sum of £1149 10 0 1/4 remaining unpaid of Mr. Adams Debt to the Town, will ever be received and paid into the Treasury——

Adams had been one of Boston’s tax collectors from 1756 to 1765. He turned over a lot less money than he was supposed to collect. No one believed Adams had kept funds for himself, however. Rather, he hadn’t pressed citizens for everything they legally owed. If the townspeople pressured him for more money, they knew he’d have little choice but to squeeze them back, and no one wanted that.

According to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, John Hancock had spurred that inquiry while knowing it could harm Adams. The finding that Adams owed more than £1,000 might indeed have been embarrassing except that the town meeting had already voted to sue him for uncollected taxes back in 1767. Hutchinson had presided over an appeal of that suit. Boston had granted Pierpont, one of Adams’s bondsmen, authority to collect back taxes on his behalf. In sum, the outstanding sum was old news.

Whitwell and his committee also found that a couple of more recent tax collectors owed £148 and £432, minus their premiums. The town was in legal negotiations with another former tax collector, Jonathan Payson. Such disputes weren’t uncommon, though Adams’s deficit was much bigger than others.

In addition, the committee found that Thomas Cushing owed £155 and John Ruddock £82 from selling lottery tickets for the town. Both those men were politically active Whigs. Hutchinson suspected Cushing had been another of Hancock’s targets.

Yet later in the same afternoon, the meeting considered the even older debt of “the Linnen Manufacturing Company” that had built the Manufactory building beside the Common. Three “Surviving Members” of that company—Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver, commissary general Thomas Hubbard, and Dr. Silvester Gardiner—asked the town to write off the remaining amount. The meeting refused. Those gentlemen were on Hutchinson’s side in the political disputes.

One more financial question remained: William Molineux petitioned the town for more money for his spinning enterprise, which provided employment for poor women and children. Or at least to forgive the £300 it had loaned him years before. Molineux was among the Boston Whigs’ most radical leaders.

That question was so involved that the discussion was adjourned to the next day. A “printed Paper” criticizing Molineux was spread around by persons unknown. “After considerable debate,” the meeting heard justice Richard Dana’s judgment that the law wouldn’t let the town forgive Molineux’s debt. So the men at the meeting voted to take no action at all beyond rejecting “unjust Reflections on Mr. Mollineuxs Character” and thanking the man for “his faithful discharge of a Contract.”

Meanwhile, Massachusetts’s royal judges took advantage of how Molineux and his supporters were busy in Faneuil Hall on that 10 March to deliver a royal pardon to convicted murderer Ebenezer Richardson so he could slip out of town unnoticed.

All in all, I see the 1772 inquiry into debts owed the town as fairly ordinary business. I’m sure Hutchinson was pleased that people had to pay attention to Samuel Adams’s “defalcation.” But I doubt the governor was accurate in believing Hancock was secretly, deliberately poking at Adams’s sensitive spot.

TOMORROW: Mr. Adams’s debt.

“An inquiry into the state of the finances of the town”

Even as he served as royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson was writing the third volume of his history of the colony.

Before he died in 1780, Hutchinson cut down that manuscript. Interestingly, he removed some passages defending his own conduct, though of course what survived presented his view of events.

Hutchinson’s grandson published the edited text in 1828. In 1936 the Harvard College administrator Lawrence Shaw Mayo (shown here) republished all three volumes in a scholarly edition.

In 1947, Mayo married Catherine Barton, a “friend and companion of long standing who shared his scholarly interests,” according to Clifford K. Shipton. Six weeks later, Mayo took his own life, to his friends’ shock.

Meanwhile, Shipton was tracking down a collector who had bought Hutchinson’s earlier manuscript. He asked Catherine Barton Mayo to study it, and she published the excised passages in the American Antiquarian Society Proceedings in 1949.

One of those passages stated about the spring of 1772:

The breach between [Samuel] Adams & [John] Hancock was apparently about this time greater than ever. The latter in a town meeting, a few weeks before, had intimated his design to move for an inquiry into the state of the finances of the town, in which the former had occasioned a great deficiency, and also into the state of monies raised by lottery for the benefit of the town of which lottery Mr. [Thomas] Cushing, the speaker of the House and a kinsman and fast friend of Mr. Adams, was one of the Trustees, and reported to be deficient.

As a town selectman, Hancock had a solid reason to push for an audit of Boston’s finances. The governor hinted that this concern was actually a clever way to distance himself from Adams and Cushing.

I’m not convinced Hutchinson’s presentation of events was accurate. To start with, although Adams and Cushing were personally close, Cushing’s politics were closer to Hancock’s, especially as the 1770s went on. On the question of how much to protest the Massachusetts General Court being convened outside of Boston, the issue that reportedly first divided Adams and Hancock in the spring of 1772, Cushing was on Hancock’s side.

Then there’s a matter of timing. Boston’s town records show that the meeting created its committee to look into financial matters on 27 May 1771. (Those records don’t say who proposed that measure.) The committee chairman was the merchant William Whitwell, and the other members were Thomas Dawes, Melatiah Bourn, Alexander Hill, and Ezekiel Price, political and business insiders.

That committee offered an interim report in June but didn’t deliver its full findings until 9 Mar 1772. Even that was, as Hutchinson’s own account says, “a few weeks before” the disagreement in the General Court led to Hancock’s first noted resentment of Adams.

Now according to Hutchinson’s unnamed sources, all the way back in June 1771 Hancock “wished to be seperated from Mr Adams.” And in December Adams sensed it necessary to assure Hancock that he hadn’t said certain things about him in a conversation about James Otis. So it’s possible that Hancock was chafing under Adams’s influence, set up the financial inquiry in May 1771, and finally openly objected to something Adams said the following April.

If so, Hancock was playing a really long game.

TOMORROW: Following the money, counting the votes.