Preview of “The Promise of Liberty” in Charlestown

From now till Monday, coinciding with the battle anniversary, the Bunker Hill Museum is playing host to a pop-up exhibit of historic documents showing the expansion of American constitutional freedom, organized by Seth Kaller.

Pictured above are:

• 18 July 1776 New-England Chronicle printing of the Declaration of Independence.
• Newspaper printing of the proposed new U.S. Constitution, followed by George Washington’s letter to the Congress as convention chairman explaining the benefits of the new government framework.
• Newspaper reporting the first twelve proposed amendments to that constitution.
• Statement autographed by Frederick Douglass.
• Newspaper report on Abraham Lincoln’s speech in Independence Hall on his way to Washington, D.C., in 1861.
• Poster from 1913 showing the progress of woman suffrage.
• Prepared text of Martin Luther King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial, to which he improvised the “Dream” passage.

The exhibit also includes a display dedicated to religious liberty and inclusion with a reproduction of President George Washington’s letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and more.

This is a prototype of a larger traveling exhibit (or series of exhibits) that Kaller envisions called The Promise of Liberty. Its website explains:

The Exhibit aims to inspire a sense of unity and pride that cuts across political divides, while encouraging gratitude for the liberties we have and igniting a collective determination to defend and expand upon the liberties promised 250 years ago.

The organization is now talking to potential sponsors, partners, and hosts in the Sestercentennial years. In the meantime, folks can get a preview in Charlestown this weekend. 

McConville on the Quebec Act at 250, 27 June

Years back, I decided to look into the burning question of whether the Quebec Act of 1774 was one of what American Patriots called the “Intolerable Acts.”

That law wasn’t, after all, directed at Massachusetts, even if the Suffolk Resolves treated the acceptance of Roman Catholicism in a population hundreds of miles away as a serious affront and threat.

The result was discovering that the American Patriots of 1774 didn’t call anything the “Intolerable Acts.” As I wrote in this article, that label surfaced in U.S. history textbooks in the late nineteenth century and was then retroactively embedded in the past.

Nonetheless, the Quebec Act was one of the significant pieces of legislation to come out of Lord North’s government. Years in the making, that law incorporated a large formerly French territory into the British Empire. His Majesty’s government accepted the civil code and religion established under the former regime. The law even expanded the province to include the lands between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

On 27 June, the Congregational Library and Archives will host “The Quebec Act at 250,” an online discussion with Prof. Brendan McConville exploring the significance of how the francophone province was folded into the British North American colonies—and why it made Congregationalists so profoundly uncomfortable.

McConville is Professor of History at Boston University and Director of the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society. He’s the author of These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776, and The Brethren: A Story of Faith and Conspiracy in Revolutionary America. He’s always offering provocative ways to look at the American Revolution.

This online event is scheduled to start at 1:00 P.M. It is free. To register and receive the link for that session, go to this page.

Tea with Gen. Gage in Salem This Week

In June 1774, 250 years ago, Salem suddenly became more important.

Parliament’s Boston Port Bill took effect on 1 June, and the harbor of Salem and Marblehead became Massachusetts’s largest port open to trade from outside the colony. The Customs office moved there.

Also, Gov. Thomas Gage adjourned the Massachusetts General Court from Boston to Salem, following orders from London. That move didn’t require a new law since the royal governor already had the power to convene the legislature where he chose. That didn’t stop most of the new session being taken up with complaints about being in Salem.

When Gage moved to the region, renting a house in nearby Danvers, he also brought a contingent of British soldiers. There doesn’t appear to have been as much friction between those troops and the locals as in Boston in 1768–1770, but the town governments still raised concerns.

This week the city’s historical organizations are commemorating that period with some public events.

Thursday, 13 June, 7:00 P.M.
Tea’s Party: From Boston to Salem and Back Again
Salem Armory Regional Visitor Center

James R. Fichter speaks about how, despite the so-called Boston Tea Party of 1773, large shipments of tea from the East India Company were sold in North America. The survival of the Boston tea shaped Massachusetts politics in 1774, impeded efforts to reimburse the company for its losses, and hinted at the enduring conflict between consumer demand and political boycotts.

That tension was not confined to Boston. As Gen. Gage and the colonial government relocated to Salem in the summer of 1774, Essex County residents found committing to a boycott just as difficult as Bostonians had.

Fichter is Associate Professor in Global and Area Studies at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of So Great a Profit: How the East Indies Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism and Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776.

This event is free. For directions, visit this page.

Saturday & Sunday, 15–16 June, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.
Governor Gage Comes to Salem
Derby Wharf, Salem

The British army will encamp on the waterfront, with some of New England’s finest living history practitioners portraying soldiers, officers, legislators, and the Loyalist and Patriot citizens of Salem. Over the weekend, visitors can meet people from many walks of life: shoeblacks, teachers, merchants, tavern-keepers, midwives, and more. Activities to be reenacted include military drill, camp cooking, placing ads in a newspaper, and political debate at the tavern.

Here is the full schedule of events.

Sunday, 16 June, 9:00 A.M.
Join the Royal Governor at Church
St. Peter’s Church, Salem

Gen. Gage attended the local Anglican Church when he was in America. In Salem, that meant St. Peter’s, which will recreate an eighteenth-century service with the general occupying the same pew that he used in 1774.

Revolution’s Edge Returns to Old North

Old North Illuminated has brought back Revolution’s Edge, its thought-provoking play set inside the church on 18 Apr 1775.

Patrick Gabridge wrote this drama to be performed in Christ Church, Boston, about actual people in that congregation in 1775, using the historical record and some dramatic imagination. It’s directed by Alexandra Smith and produced by Jess Meyer for Plays in Place.

It looks like there’s a new cast this summer. The Rev. Mather Byles, Jr., a Loyalist at odds with most of his flock, is being played by Eric McGowan and Tim Hoover. Cato, the African man enslaved by Byles and the play’s narrative voice, is played by Stetson Marshall and Joshua Lee Robinson. Captain John Pulling, Jr., a church vestryman and Patriot activist, is played by Dustin Teuber and Kevin Paquette.

I wrote about the play last summer. The approaching Sestercentennial anniversary of the day it depicts makes it even more resonant.

Revolution’s Edge lasts about forty-five minutes. It will be performed four nights a week through 10 August. For more information, a video preview, and tickets, visit Old North Illuminated.

John Malcom: The Early Years

Back in January I wrote about the mobbing of Customs officer John Malcom on the Sestercentennial anniversary of that event.

The standard study of that attack is “Tar and Feathers: The Adventures of Captain John Malcom,” written by Frank W. C. Hersey in 1941 and available through the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Alfred F. Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party looks at the same day through the eyes of George R. T. Hewes.

I collected some additional information about Malcom that I didn’t have time to dig through and share in January, so now I’m doubling back to his story. We can call this series “The Further Adventures of Captain John Malcom.” Though really it’s more of a prequel.

First of all, a note about nomenclature: Capt. John Malcom spelled his name without a second L, as did his brother Daniel Malcom. However, many people writing about him spelled the surname in the traditional Scottish style as “Malcolm.” Indeed, Hersey transcribed a petition signed by Malcom which a clerk then labeled as coming from “Mr. Malcolm.”

Because so many historians rendered the name as “Malcolm,” I followed that style in making a Boston 1775 tag for the man years ago. However, in these postings I’m going to use the spellings that individuals preferred.

This story starts in 1721, when Michael and Sarah Malcom arrived in Boston from Ulster, Ireland, where their ancestors had moved from Scotland in the previous century. They brought young children named William and Elizabeth.

On 20 May 1723 Sarah gave birth to a second boy, whom they called John. The family then moved to Georgetown in the district of Maine. Another baby boy, Daniel, arrived on 29 Nov 1725, followed by Allen in 1733 and Martha in 1738.

Michael Malcom invested in the Massachusetts “Land Bank or Manufactory Scheme.” In 1745 he was assessed to pay £16, on the high side of those investors.

Also in 1745, wrote Hersey, young John Malcom “served as an ensign in the Second Massachusetts Regiment, commanded by Colonel Samuel Waldo, at the siege of Louisbourg; and this same year he was captain of a vessel which carried dispatches from Louisbourg to Boston,” presaging his maritime career. However, John Malcom’s name also appears as a private enlisting in Capt. Elisha Doane’s company in August 1746.

In 1750 John Malcom married Sarah Balch at Boston’s Presbyterian Meeting-House. The Rev. John Moorhead baptized five of their children between 1751 and 1758.

Younger brother Daniel Malcom also came to Boston and married Ann Fudge, and they also had children starting in 1751. He became a prominent member of the Anglican Christ Church’s congregation. While John named one of his sons Daniel, I’ve found no evidence Daniel named any of his boys John.

Both John and Daniel went to sea, made Boston their home port, and rose to be merchant captains. By the late 1740s a captain or two named Malcom was sailing out of Boston for Cape Fear, North Carolina; Antigua; Annapolis; Philadelphia; Honduras; Bristol, England; and Youghal, Ireland. By the 1750s the Malcoms were owners or part-owners of ships. They traded all over North America, the Caribbean, and Britain—and occasionally Cadiz and Lisbon.

It wasn’t illegal to trade with Portugal, Spain, or Caribbean islands claimed by other empires, but there were higher tariffs on most goods traded that way. Ship captains usually tried every trick they could to minimize those tariffs. Many of those methods made that trade into illegal smuggling, but in that period Boston merchants generally figured that as long as they didn’t get too blatant the Customs service wouldn’t come down hard on them.

The real hazards in ocean trade were natural disasters and war.

TOMORROW: Wrecked and captured.

How the Massachusetts Press Responded to the 1783 Earthquake

Prompted by Karen Kleemann’s article quoted yesterday, I looked at how Massachusetts newspapers treated the 29 Nov 1783 earthquake and found some interesting details.

First, we’re used to a standard time extending across an entire time zone. But before railroads, every town had its own noon, and therefore its own perception of when something big happened.

The Massachusetts Gazette and General Advertiser in Springfield said this earthquake was felt “at 40 minutes past 10 o’clock.” The Boston Gazette reported it at “about six minutes before eleven o’clock.” And the Salem Gazette pegged it “at about 11 o’clock.” Of course, it took a few seconds for the shock to travel between those places. The big difference in those times came from how the Earth spins.

All those reports appeared in the first week of December. Starting on 8 December, Massachusetts newspapers began reporting on other places people detected the quake. Printers wondered if it wasn’t as small an event as it first seemed. On 12 December, the Salem Gazette said the shaking was definitely worse in Connecticut and New York.

By 18 December, the newspapers from Philadelphia had arrived, and Massachusetts printers could share details from nearer the epicenter in New Jersey. China and pewter thrown off shelves! People woken from sleep! Aftershocks later the same night!

Still, there were no deaths. Earlier in the year, American newspapers had reprinted news of many people dying from earthquakes in Italy, and similar reports from China.

Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy editorialized:

This year must make a conspicuous figure in the instructive records of Time: Great revolutions have occured in the natural and political world.

In Europe the convulsions of nature have destroyed a great part of Sicily, &c. with about one hundred thousand inhabitants. In America such events have taken place, as were before unknown to its civilized inhabitants.

What gratitude is due from us to heaven for its Benedictions—Independence, as a Nation, with the blessings of Peace; and that we have not in the first transports of our national existence met with those calamities that might in a moment have reduced our Continent to its original Chaos!

The Salem Gazette’s 12 December follow-up to its first report ran just above a local disaster with real damage: A fire in John Piemont’s barn in Ipswich had killed one cow and consumed all his hay for the winter.

Back in 1770, Piemont was a hair stylist at the center of Boston, and at the center of Boston events, as I discussed back here. He was able to bounce back from this fire, and in 1784 advertised that he once more offered a stable for horses.

(The broadside shown above dates from almost thirty years after this quake.)

“Intensely interested in the history of the battles for independence”

Albert Tyler (1823–1913, shown here courtesy of the Cabinet Card Gallery) was born in Smithfield, Rhode Island. As a teenager he trained as a printer at the Massachusetts Spy in Worcester.

This was the newspaper that Isaiah Thomas co-founded in Boston, then moved to central Massachusetts just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.

After coming of age, Tyler moved to the nearby town of Barre and printed the Barre Patriot for several years. Then in 1851 he left printing to be a Universalist minister.

Over the next ten years Tyler preached to three congregations, which might indicate that profession was not for him, but he kept the honorific “Reverend” nonetheless.

Tyler returned to Worcester and went into business with another former employee of the Massachusetts Spy (and Universalist), Daniel Seagrave (1831–1902). They bought the book and job printing operation of the Spy, staying in the same building.

In 1875 Tyler, Seagrave, and a grocery magnate named Samuel E. Staples (1822–1902) took the lead in founding the Worcester Society of Antiquity. Seagrave became its first secretary.

Thirty years later, on 6 June 1905, society secretary E. B. Crane read reminiscences from the Rev. Albert Tyler about “singular happenings” related to the building of the society’s collections. At the start of one anecdote the octogenarian recalled what appear to be the course of lectures Walton Felch offered at the end of 1840:

In 1839, in the old and original Worcester Town Hall, a traveling lecturer, Walter Felch by name, gave phrenological examinations in the day-time and lectured in the evening upon phrenology, then a popular topic. He exhibited the usual array of drawings, plaster casts and skulls in the delineation of his subject.

Among the latter were two skulls, which he said the Selectmen of Concord had permitted him to take from the graves of the British soldiers who fell in that first battle of the Revolution.

The writer was a boy of fifteen years of age, who, as a Spy printer boy, had a free pass to the lecture. He was intensely interested in the history of the battles for independence . . .

Nearly forty years passed away, the boy had become a man beyond middle age, and was one of the proprietors, under the business name of Tyler & Seagrave, of the office in which he had learned the trade. In editing and printing a historical work, we came across the name of “Walton Felch,” whose brief history was necessary to its completeness. After many inquiries we learned of the residence of his widow. We communicated with her, and she called at our office.

The boy, who remembered the skulls, was not so sure he remembered the name, and though the husband’s name seemed familiar, forty years had dimmed his recollection into uncertainty, but he ventured to ask the widow if her husband ever lectured on phrenology. She said he had in his younger days. The query then followed, “Did he have two skulls of British soldiers who fell at Concord?”

TOMORROW: Yes and no.

“The healing power of Mesmerism and Pure Water”

At the end of the year 1840, Walton Felch, “Teacher of the Science of PHRENOLOGY, otherwise known as the author of a new theory of language,” came to Worcester.

Felch’s advertisement in the Worcester Palladium, illustrated with a man’s profile, stated that he had “been employed, within the last 2 years, to deliver nearly 40 courses of from six to eight Lectures, before not less than 11 or 12,000 persons.”

He now offered the people of Worcester his expertise on:

Phrenology, and its Application
to Government, Education, Social Intercourse, the Philosophy of Language, and of Rhetoric, and the Moral, Intellectual, and Physical Improvement of Mankind.

And the first lecture in the Town Hall was absolutely free, if that’s how you wanted to spend the evening of 25 December.

In April 1842 Felch offered eight lectures on phrenology in Boston’s North End, followed by seven in the vestry of the Fifth Universalist Church. After that, notices of his talks stop appearing in newspapers.

Felch continued to show an interest in phrenology. In November 1851, he assisted another practitioner, Dr. Noyes Wheeler, in lectures in Boston and then served as “chairman” of a meeting of Wheeler’s friends voting him a commendation.

By that time, however, Walton Felch had moved on to some other forms of healing. The first sign of this appears in a curious stretch of newspaper items in 1847 that stars with the 26 March Barre Gazette report of a robbery of James H. Desper’s store of goods and silver worth about $112.

Two weeks later, the Barre Patriot reported that “Dr W. Felch” had helped to found the Barre Falls Lyceum for the “easterly part of town.” He became its president, and Desper was steward. (I can’t help but wonder if that was the result of some dispute within the Barre Lyceum.)

On 28 May the Barre Gazette ran a notice saying:

Veto! Veto!! Veto!!!!

I, JAMES H. DESPER of Barre, having lately heard a variety of Reports apparently designed to raise a public prejudice against Dr. W. Felch, and theredy [sic] hinder him from giving proofs of the healing power of Mesmerism and Pure Water as applied by himself;—1st, that he was turned out of my house; 2d, that he injured the health of my wife and others while boarding here;—3d, that he has been suspected of breaking open our store, &c. &c. I hereby give notice, and my wife sets her signature with mine, that all these reports are most villainous falsehoods; which character, we doubt not, is common to all the reports against the same individual. . . .

And the enemies of reform ought to know that persecution is very much like a kicking gun—there is only one thing certain about it—that is, the kicking over of the fool that fires it off.

“Pure Water” was a sign that Felch, now styling himself a physician, had adopted hydrotherapy as his principal field.

In 1850 the Water-Cure Journal and Herald of Reform reported that “Dr. W. Felch” had just opened the Green Mountain Water-Cure in North Adams. That year’s U.S. Census located Felch in Adams.

In 1854 both the Water-Cure Journal and William Garrison’s Liberator told readers that Dr. Felch was the physician at the new Cape Cod Water-Cure in Harwichport. “Ellen M. Smith, (a young lady of medical education,)” was his assistant, though elsewhere listed as a hydropathic physician herself.

To be sure, the Boston Semi-Weekly Advertiser for 28 Jan 1854 said “Dr. W. FELCH, of Cambridge,” was lecturing every Sunday “on the Philosophy and Evidence of Ghost-seeing.” I can’t say for sure that was Walton Felch, but the 1855 state census and 1860 federal census found him and his second wife Nancy in Boston. His son Hiram had become a city official.

(I’m assuming Walton Felch was not the “W. Felch” quoted in advertisements for “Dr. Hill’s Cordial Balm of Syriacum” in 1855, stating he “had the misfortune to contract the veneral affection of the most aggravated character.” Mostly because this writer had nothing to say about his own medical knowledge.)

By 1870 Hiram Felch had moved out to Boxborough, and Walton and Nancy were back in the Coldbrook Springs part of Oakham.

In 1872, now over eighty years old, Felch made his will. He left his books to be divided equally among Nancy and three grown children and his real estate to be sold to support his widow.

Walton Felch died in Boxborough later that year, apparently visiting his son; his body was returned to “Coldbrook” for burial. That May, the Massachusetts Spy reported that the man’s estate included $700 in real estate and $300 in personal property.

TOMORROW: But what happened to the British soldiers’ skulls?

“When forty-two countrymen Sure bid their friends adieu.”

Ezra Lunt and Henry-Walter Tinges printed the Essex Journal in Newburyport with the financial backing of Isaiah Thomas, who made a hasty move from Boston to Worcester in April 1775.

On 26 May, the Essex Journal published this verse in a section of the back page titled “The Parnassian Packet”:

A Funeral ELEGY, to the Immortal Memory of those Worthies, who were slain in the Battle of CONCORD, April 19, 1775.

AID me ye nine! my muse assist,
A sad tale to relate,
When such a number of brave men
Met their unhappy fate.
At Lexington they met their foe
Completely all equip’d,
Their guns and swords made glitt’ring show,
But their base scheme was nipp’d.
Americans, go drop a tear
Where your slain brethren lay!
O! mourn and sympathize for them!
O! weep this very day!
What shall we say to this loud call
From the Almighty sent;
It surely bids both great and small
Seek GOD’s face and repent.
Words can’t express the ghastly scene
That here presents to view,
When forty-two brave countrymen
Sure bid their friends adieu.
To think how awful it must seem,
To hear widows relent
Their husbands and their children
Who to the grave was sent.
The tender babes, nay those unborn,
O! dismal cruel death!
To snatch their fondest parents dear,
And leave them thus bereft.
O! Lexington, your loss is great!
Alas! too great to tell,
But justice bids me to relate
What to you has befell.
Ten of your hardy, bravest sons,
Some in their prime did fall;
May we no more hear noise of guns
To terrify us all.
Let’s not forget the Danvers race
So late in battle slain,
Their courage and their valor shown
Upon the crimson’d plain.
Sev’n of your youthful sprightly sons
In the fierce fight were slain,
O! may your loss be all made up,
And prove a lasting gain.
Cambridge and Medford’s loss is great,
Though not like Acton’s town,
Where three fierce military sons
Met their untimely doom.
Menotomy and Charlestown met
A sore and heavy stroke,
In losing five young brave townsmen
Who fell by tyrant’s yoke.
Unhappy Lynn and Beverly,
Your loss I do bemoan,
Five of your brave sons in dust doth lye,
Who late were in their bloom.
Bedford, Woburn, Sudbury, all,
Have suffer’d most severe,
You miss five of your choicest chore,
On them let’s drop a tear.
Concord your Captain’s fate rehearse,
His loss is felt severe,
Come, brethren, join with me in verse,
His mem’ry hence revere.
O ’Squire Gardiner’s death we feel,
And sympathizing mourn,
Let’s drop a tear when it we tell,
And view his hapless urn.
We sore regret poor Pierce’s death,
A stroke to Salem’s town,
Where tears did flow from ev’ry brow,
When the sad tidings come.
The groans of wounded, dying men,
Would melt the stoutest soul,
O! how it strikes thro’ ev’ry vein.
My flesh and blood runs cold.
May all prepare to meet their fate
At GOD’s tribunal bar,
And may war’s terrible alarm
For death us now prepare.
Your country calls you far and near,
America’s sons ’wake,
Your helmet, buckler, and your spear,
The LORD’s own arm now take
His shield will keep us from all harm,
Tho’ thousands gainst us rise,
His buckler we must sure put on,
If we would win the prize.

This tribute to the local men killed the previous month started with the town of Lexington, not just because redcoats had fired the first fatal shots there but because that town lost more men than any other.

Seven Danvers men were killed in and around Jason Russell’s house in Menotomy, so that town got the next mention—which the newspaper’s Essex County audience probably appreciated.

Eventually the poet got to individuals, naming a couple of men at the top of society—Capt. James Miles of Concord and Isaac Gardiner, Esq., of Brookline—and Benjamin Pierce of Salem, also killed at the Russell House. Other dead officers went unnamed, however.

Ezekiel Russell printed this poem at the bottom of his “Bloody Butchery of the British Troops” broadside, shown above. You can peruse that page more closely through the American Antiquarian Society, founded by Thomas.

The Russell broadside contained some errors (a missing “brave,” “young” became “your,” another “your” dropped out), suggesting that shop hastily copied the text out of the newspaper. I would have expected the transmission to go the other way: from the Russell print shop, which was known for publishing a young woman’s elegiac verses, to the Essex Journal.

That in turn suggests that Russell didn’t issue the “Bloody Butchery” broadside until more than a month after the battle. Maybe he needed that time to engrave all those coffins.

“We shall have many chearful rides together yet”

As I quoted yesterday, in his 6 Apr 1775 letter to his wife Mercy, James Warren started by telling her that the latest news from London made a political solution to Massachusetts’s conflict with the Crown less likely.

And that had kept the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in Concord from adjourning as he’d hoped.

Warren went on:

However my Spirits are by no means depressd, you well know my Sentiments of the Force of both Countrys, you know my opinion of the Justness of our Cause, you know my Confidence in a Righteous Providence. I seem to want nothing to keep up my Spirits and to Inspire me with a proper resolution to Act my part well in this difficult time but seeing you in Spirits, and knowing that they flow from the heart.

How shall I support myself if you suffer these Misfortunes to prey on your tender frame and Add to my difficulties an affliction too great to bear of itself. The Vertuous should be happy under all Circumstances. This state of things will last but a little while. I believe we shall have many chearful rides together yet.

We proposed last week a short adjournment and I had in a manner Engaged a Chamber here for my Beloved and pleased myself with the health and pleasure the Journey was to give her; but I believe it must be postponed till some Event takes place and changes the face of things.

There was deep affection between the Warrens, just as there was between their friends, John and Abigail Adams. At this time James was forty-eight years old, Mercy forty-six. They had five children, all boys; the youngest was George, who turned nine that year. Looks like James thought that was old enough for Mercy to come to Concord for some private time with him while the congress wasn’t in session.

At the end of his 6 April letter, James returned to that personal message for Mercy:

But to dismiss publick matters, let me ask how you do and how do my little Boys, especially my little Henry [second youngest, born in 1764], who was Complaining. I long to see you. I long to sit with you under our Vines etc and have none to make us afraid. Do you know that I have not heard from you since I left you, and that is a long while. It seems a month at least. I can't believe it less. I intend to fly Home I mean as soon as Prudence Duty and Honour will permitt.

The line about “Vines” was another Biblical allusion (Micah 4:4; also 1 Kings 4:25; Zechariah 3:10). The Warrens knew that phrase well enough that James could cut it off with an “etc.”

That verse was also a favorite of George Washington, another gentleman planter. And through him it got into the lyrics of Hamilton.

TOMORROW: Concord’s cannon.

“The unrivaled honor of having shed the first British blood”?

I’ve written several postings about Solomon Brown, even suggesting he might have been responsible for the first shot in Lexington on the morning of 19 Apr 1775.

There’s one source about him I haven’t been able to nail down.

In an 1880 issue of The Magazine of American History, the Rev. Horace Edwin Hayden of Pennsylvania quoted a local obituary of Solomon Brown like this:

Deacon Solomon Brown

The individual whose name heads this article, and a notice of whose death appeared in this paper, a short time since, was one of the oldest inhabitants of New Haven in this county [in Vermont], and died claiming the respect of all who knew him, for his virtues both as a man and a citizen. . . . 

Deacon Brown was a soldier of the Revolution, and bore a part in that memorable struggle, which should immortalize him in the annals of his country. He was a participator in the first battle for freedom on the plains of Lexington, and has the unrivaled honor of having shed the first British blood in defence of American liberty, at the battle of Lexington on the morning of the 19th of April, 1775.

This battle was the opening scene of the bloody drama which closed with the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, and in this scene the subject of this notice stands forth the most prominent actor. He wrote in blood the first word in the charter of American freedom. Let his name be registered among the noblest of his country's benefactors and heroes, and honored by posterity as the most dauntless of their heroic sires. Deacon Brown served five years in the revolution as a sergeant of artillery, and encountered all the perils and hardships of that memorable and glorious struggle. He died mourned by his friends, lamented by the church, and respected by all. 

But as to the source of that encomium, Hayden could only say: “Middlebury, Vt., Free Press, about 1830.”

Two years later, Hayden published A Biographical Sketch of Captain Oliver Brown, an Officer of the Revolutionary Army who Commanded the Party which Destroyed the Statue of George the Third. Solomon was Oliver’s younger brother, so he tagged along in that booklet. Unfortunately, Hayden’s citation only got worse with Middlebury turned into “Middleburg.”

I went looking for the newspaper article Hayden quoted. It doesn’t appear in the newspaper database I access. Furthermore, I discovered that there was no Middlebury Free Press in 1830. The printer E. D. Barber was still calling his young newspaper the Anti-Masonic Republican.

In the Genealogical and Family History of the State of Vermont compiled by Hiram Carleton in 1903, I found a statement that Solomon Brown died on 6 June 1837. That date does fall in the period when Barber called his newspaper the Middlebury Free Press, just before he sold out to Hamilton Drury and it became the Vermont Argus and Free Press. So we should be able to narrow the search down to the summer of 1837—if copies of the newspaper survive from then.

Another voice speaking to Solomon Brown’s primacy was Josiah Bushnell Grinnell (1821–1891, shown above). He was a U.S. Representative from Iowa and namesake of Grinnell College. In 1887 he returned to his home town of New Haven, Vermont, to deliver a historical address, later published. Grinnell stated:

Dea. Solomon Brown also lived and died here fifty years ago. To him belongs the honor of having fired the first effective shot at the red coats in the revolutionary war. I attended his funeral, at which his memorable shot was mentioned, and I just remember the story from his own lips. . . . He did not wait for orders and sighted an honest gun at a red coat spy, where was found blood, and to him belongs the honor of that first shot which “echoed round the world.”

Both Hayden and Grinnell cited the depositions collected by Elias Phinney in his 1825 History of the Battle of Lexington as supporting Brown’s claim. The evidence in that book is more equivocal.

It’s worth noting that in 1775 no British officers reported that the regulars on Lexington common suffered any wounds, and they had every reason to do so in the effort to cast blame on the provincials.

Solomon Brown might well have shot at the redcoats—he could even have been the first to do so. But that doesn’t mean his shots hit anyone.

Upcoming Events on Revolutionary History at the M.H.S.

Here are three different types of online events coming up from the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Tuesday, 6 February, 5:00 to 6:15 P.M.
Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar Series
“The Social World of Revolutionary New England”
Panel discussion with:

• Nicole Breault, University of Texas, El Paso
• Christopher Walton, Southern Methodist University
• Mark Peterson, Yale University

Nicole Breault’s research centers on Boston watchmen who walked the streets at night to monitor for signs of fire, distress, and disorder. Through night constables’ reports, orders governing watches, town records, acts of the General Court, and justice of the peace records, Breault’s paper examines local-level police training prior to the professionalization of law enforcement and more broadly, quotidian acquisitions of legal knowledge in early America.

Christopher Walton’s work examines how Congregational clergy in the Connecticut Valley ministered to their communities through suffering during the American Revolution. As the religious community dealt with sickness and death locally, it learned to respond piously to loss at the battlefront. Through suffering, religion became personal as individuals took solace in religious truth and cultivated piety.

Peterson, author of The City-State of Boston, will comment on Breault and Walton’s papers (which are available to seminar subscribers).

Register for “The Social World of Revolutionary New England” here.

Thursday, 15 February, 6:00 to 7:00 P.M.
“First Family: George Washington’s Heirs & the Making of America”
Cassandra Good, Marymount University,
in conversation with Sara Georgini, M.H.S.

While George and Martha Washington never had children of their own, they raised numerous children together. In First Family, we see Washington as a father figure, and also meet the children he helped to raise. The children of Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage—Eliza, Patty, Nelly and Wash Custis—were born into life in the public eye. Raised in the country’s first “first family,” they remained well-known not only as Washington’s family, but also as keepers of his legacy throughout their lives.

As the country grapples with concerns about political dynasties and the public role of presidential families, the saga of Washington’s family offers a human story of historical precedent.

Register for “First Family: George Washington’s Heirs & the Making of America” here. This is a free public event.


Monday and Tuesday, 19–20 February, 9:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.
“Perspectives on the Boston Massacre & the Legacy of Crispus Attucks”
Teacher Workshop

This two-day workshop is offered for Grade 3-12 educators with a focus on Grade 5, covering content relevant to Grade 5 Investigating History, Early U.S., 19th Century, and African American History.

On a cold night in March 1770, simmering conflict broke out into a riot between colonial Bostonians and British soldiers. Competing witness accounts from across all walks of Boston life made it difficult to know exactly what happened, but the night ended with the death of five colonists including Crispus Attucks, a Black and Indigenous sailor, and became a flashpoint in the conflict between colonists and British rule.

Eighty-five years later, Black historian and community leader William Cooper Nell brought Crispus Attucks back into the public’s consciousness, connecting Black participation in the Revolutionary Era to 19th-century abolitionists’ calls for emancipation and equal civil rights for Black Americans.

Using primary sources and resources from the MHS’ History Source, educators will:

• Explore conflicting witness testimonies and multiple perspectives from a diverse array of Bostonians.
• Investigate ways in which people of color have been both present for and critical actors in turning points in American history.
• Discuss how and why public memory of the Boston Massacre has changed over time–and how point of view influences our interpretation of the past.
• Model strategies for analyzing primary sources in the classroom.

This teacher workshop has a fee of $40 per person. Participants can earn P.D.P.’s or other professional credits—see the webpage for any additional fees. Register for “Perspectives on the Boston Massacre & the Legacy of Crispus Attucks” here.

“John Malcom returns thanks to Almighty God”

Like pretty much everything else in colonial Boston, the mobbing of John Malcolm had a religious aspect.

Malcolm’s parents had migrated from Ireland in 1721, and before that the family was from Scotland. When he married and had children in the 1750s, Malcolm did so in the Rev. John Moorhead’s Presbyterian meeting-house.

(That congregation eventually evolved into the Arlington Street Church. Its surviving eighteenth-century records have been digitized by Harvard, and the image above comes from a book of baptisms. Good luck using that source.)

In 1769, Malcolm made a career change and joined the Customs service. His first station was in Newport, Rhode Island. The Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles recorded in his diary the difficulties Malcolm found in worshipping there:

24 [Feb 1770]. I am told that Mr. Malcom last week signified his Desires to some of the Brethren of the first Cong. Chh. here to partake with them in the Lord’s Supper last Lords day. His motion was declined.

He is an officer in the Customs here: lately removed from Boston & settled here, & with his Family attends that Meeting. Tho’ a Congregationalist, yet not Member in Communion. with any Congrega. Chh: yet to qualify for an office had received the Sacrament at an Episcopal Chh., I think in Boston.

It is the declared principle of our Churches to receive to occasional Communion, any sober Communicants from any protestant Chhs., as Episco., Bapt., &c., if they should desire it. He pleaded this right. But the scruple arose on his Morals, which are exceptionable.

There’s no clue about what made Malcolm morally objectionable, if it wasn’t simply joining the Customs service. In 1771 he attended Stiles’s own meeting six times before leaving New England for his next assignment.

This episode shows a couple of things. First, Malcolm wanted to be part of a congregation. He preferred independent meetings, though reportedly was willing to take communion in an Anglican church if it would help his career with the royal government. I haven’t seen any evidence about where the Malcolm family was worshipping when he was back in Boston in the winter of 1773–1774.

The first newspaper essay to discuss religion in connection to the January 1774 crowd attack on Malcolm in fact never appeared in a newspaper. But in announcing that he declined to print that essay in the 3 February Boston News-Letter, Richard Draper got the main point across:

VERITAS, his Observations on the Method of Punishment inflicted on J. Malcom, in a Place professing the Christian Religion, cannot be inserted.—He concludes “I would have every one punished that is deserving of it.—But would not have it to be said by the INDIANS, We are SAVAGES.”

In other words, the violence of the attack on Malcolm made Bostonians look bad, even to people that community stereotyped as violent.

During his recovery, Malcolm himself released a couple of public statements. The Boston Evening-Post was the first to publish one, on 14 February:

Yesterday se’nnight [i.e., Sunday, 6 February] the following Note, it’s said, was sent to several Churches in this Town, viz.

“John Malcom desires Prayers of the Christian People of this Congregation, that the vile abuse received on the 25th Day or Evening of January last past, from a vile rebellious Mob, without Provocation, may be sanctified to him and his Family; and that he may bless God that his Usefulness is still spared, and that he is greatly recovered from his dreadful Wounds and Bruises he then received from the bloody and cruel Hands of these cruel Mortals here below.—

May God forgive them!

Just above that item the Fleet brothers printed a warning to peddlers not to sell tea, that paragraph ending with the threat of “a modern Dress.—Remember Pedlar Malcom’s Fate!” So that writer wasn’t in the same forgiving mood.

On 17 March, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy published Malcolm’s next message:

Last Sunday se’nnight [i.e., Sunday, 6 March], the following curious note was sent to several churches in this town, and we hear was read at one of them, viz.

“John Malcom returns thanks to Almighty God, that again he is able to wait on him again in the public worship, after the cruel and barbarous usage of a cruel and barbarous mob in Boston, on the 25th evening of January last past confined him to house, bed and room.

“March 6, 1775.”

I haven’t found any response to these items questioning Malcolm’s faith or choice of denomination, or arguing against the point they all made about how Jesus told people to treat their enemies. Most people seem to have preferred to let that topic drop.

“The Custom house would drench us with this Poison”

Within a week after he was attacked by a mob, Customs officer John Malcolm petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for compensation.

He filed a memorial “setting forth great Abuses he has receiv’d, and praying to be enabled to take Measures for immediate Relief, and for Redress.”

The Council approved this petition on 1 February and sent it down to the assembly. The lower house voted “That the Petitioner have Leave to withdraw his Petition”—i.e., rejected.

On 17 March, almost two months after the riot, Malcolm published thanks to God that he was finally well enough to go back to church.

After another few weeks, on 4 May, H.M.S. Active sailed out of Boston harbor, “with whom went Passenger, the famous ’Squire Malcom,” according to the Boston Post-Boy.

In London, Malcolm told his story to a more sympathetic audience. He petitioned Lord North on 28 July. In the new year, he even presented his case to King George III.

The London newspapers reported on Malcolm’s sufferings, including a detail that hadn’t appeared in any American account so far:

A Correspondent says he has been informed, by a Gentleman lately arrived from Philadelphia, that when Mr. John Malcomb, an Officer of the Customs at Boston, was leading, tarred and feathered, to the Gallows, with a Rope about his Neck, he was asked by one of the Mob whether he was not thirsty, which was natural to a Man expecting to be hanged.

The unfortunate Officer of the Customs, as well as he could speak, answered yes; and immediately a large Bowl of strong Tea was put into his Hands, with Orders to drink the King’s Health. Whether it was owing to Loyalty or Thirst is not material; poor Malcomb Half emptied the Bowl.

He was then told he must mend his Draught, and drink the Queen’s Health. Though he had done his utmost for the King, he found he must do something for the Queen; and having taken off Half the Remainder of the Bowl, he presented it back to the Persons from whom he had received it.

Hold! hold! cries his Friend, you are not to forget the rest of the Royal Family; come, drink to the Prince of Wales. Replenish, replenish, cries the loyal American; and instantly poor Malcomb saw two Quarts more of what he was heartily sick of. Make Haste, cries another loyal American; you have nine more Healths to drink before you arrive at the Gallows.

For God’s Sake, Gentlemen, be merciful, I am ready to burst; if I drink a Drop more, I shall die.

Suppose you do, cries one of the Mob, you die in a good Cause, and it is as well to be drowned as hanged, and immediately the drenching Horn was put to his Mouth, to the Health of the Bishop of Osnabrug; and, having gone through the other eight, he turned pale, shook his Head, and instantly filled the Bowl which he had just emptied [i.e., vomited].

What, says the American, are you sick of the Royal Family? No, replies Malcomb, my Stomack nauseates the Tea; it rises at it like Poison.

And yet, you Rascal, returns the American, your whole Fraternity at the Custom house would drench us with this Poison, and we are to have our Throats cut if it will not stay upon our Stomachs. The merciful Americans desisted, and the Procession was continued towards the Gallows.

This anecdote was reprinted in Boston newspapers, including the Patriot Massachusetts Spy, in December. I haven’t found any local response saying it was untrue. However, it’s possible that at the time everyone saw this story—not attributed to Malcolm nor any Bostonian who actually witnessed the attack—as a joke using a newsworthy event to make a point about the Customs service and the Tea Act.

London artists seized on that detail about the tea. The “New Method of Macarony Making” print I showed yesterday included a Boston rioter pressing a big pot of tea on Malcolm. In the print above, “The Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man, or Tarring and Feathering,” the mob is actually pouring tea down Malcolm’s throat.

Furthermore, in the background of that print men are emptying tea chests off the side of a ship into the water—the earliest visual depiction of the Boston Tea Party. And as a reminder of the town’s ten-year history of trouble, “LIBERTY-TREE” holds an upside-down paper marked “Stamp Act.”

Malcolm hadn’t been personally involved in the stand-off over the East India Company tea, but he worked for the Customs Commissioners who had forced the issue. For Londoners, the attack on Malcolm and the destruction of dutied tea both showed the Bostonians’ contempt for the imperial government—“Paying the Excise-Man” with violence instead of their fair share of taxes.

TOMORROW: A retrospective on the riot.

Meeting Mary Vanderlight through Her Account Books

Hope (Power) Brown died in 1792 at the age of ninety. Her gravestone told visitors she was “The mother of Nicholas, Joseph, John, and Moses Brown.”

As Karen Wulf recently wrote at Commonplace, that left off Hope’s daughter, Mary (Brown) Vanderlight (1731–95).

“The Brown Brothers Had a Sister” shares what information survives about that member of the prominent Providence family:

She married David Vanderlight, a doctor and Dutch immigrant, in the early 1750s. Both her husband and their only child, a baby boy, died in February of 1755.

When she died in the spring of 1795, Mary Brown Vanderlight had been a widow for four decades, and lived on her own or with her mother. Like her mother, she remained a stalwart of the Baptist church that their forebears had helped found (though her brothers wandered to Quakerism and the Anglican church). Like her mother, she never remarried. Like her mother, she was the administrator of her husband’s estate, a complex job that came with significant legal and other practical responsibilities.

The main documentation for Vanderlight’s life is in account books—hers and other people’s. She started tracking her finances before her marriage, helped her husband manage his practice, and kept going as she had to support herself.

From the time David died, Mary continued the surviving account books. It looks like she also continued to serve patients at least by selling medicines but maybe also by practicing—or even teaching. As late as 1757 she was billing her neighbor Elisha Shearman for having trained his son in the “arts of apothicary.”

She also took up her husband’s role in the library [now the Providence Atheneum] and was listed as one of only two women among the nearly 150 “proprietors” who regularly paid to support—and use—it. . . .

She also kept investing. These investments included, according to a single notation in one of her brother’s accounts, helping to finance the infamous slaving voyage of the Sally.

Where did Mary Vanderlight learn to keep accounts? Wulf writes that she probably learned that skill from her mother, who for decades managed her own books and tracked who in the family owned what.

Who wrote, “we can make every Tory tremble”?

Earlier this year, I saw a tweet crediting Samuel Adams with the line: “With ladies on our side, we can make every Tory tremble.”

Adams wasn’t usually that pithy, and the statement doesn’t appear in the four volumes of The Writings of Samuel Adams.

The line first appeared in a letter to Daniel Fowle’s New-Hampshire Gazette published on 22 July 1774. Here’s more context:

The Consumption of TEA I think is in a fair Way of being totally laid aside in this Town, as there are but very few indeed, that will refuse to sign or solemnly ingage not to suffer it used in their Families;

and what adds a great Pleasure to us all, is, that the Fair Sex universally consent to give up, this detested superfluous Article; and under the Auspices of the worthy Doctor Clement Jackson, we hope soon to see a glorious List of Female Worthies, whose Virtue can withstand every daring Insult when put to the Test; and we all desire their Names may be recorded in the Town Books, to perpetuate their Memories:---

Then let us see who will sell that obnoxious Herb, for with the Ladies on our side, we can make every Tory tremble; as it is generally agreed upon, not to frequent those Shops were TEA is sold.

The signature, under a Latin quotation, was “AMICUS.”

A few weeks later, on 26 August, the New-Hampshire Gazette published another letter, addressed to the people of New Hampshire and signed “AMICUS PATRIAE.” It urged people in that colony to support Boston, suffering under Parliament’s Coercive Acts, with donations for the poor.

Both letters show a pattern of short italicized phrases and occasional all-capitalized nouns. Both end with Latin quotations. The signatures overlap. I therefore think it’s likely the two letters came from the same pen.

In his History of New-Hampshire (1792), the Rev. Jeremy Belknap printed a letter from New Hampshire governor John Winthrop to the Earl of Dartmouth dated 29 August, which said:

The town-clerk of Boston [William Cooper], who is said to be a zealous leader of the popular opposition, has been in this town about a week; immediately appears a publication in the New-Hampshire Gazette, recommending donations for Boston…

Belknap added a footnote to that sentence:

The publication here referred to was written by a person whom the Governor did not suspect, and the town-clerk knew nothing of it.

But Belknap obviously did know the author. In fact, his granddaughter Jane Belknap Marcou wrote in her 1847 biography that she had found “the imperfect manuscript [i.e., draft] remaining among Mr. Belknap’s papers.” In other words, he’d written it himself.

Back in 1774, Jeremy Belknap was the minister in Dover, New Hampshire. Ministers weren’t supposed to get directly involved in politics, but as “AMICUS PATRIAE” he had things to tell his fellow citizens. And Belknap also appears to have been the most likely author of the line “With ladies on our side, we can make every Tory tremble.” (I wonder if a draft of that essay might be in his papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society.)

The line resurfaced in John C. Miller’s Origins of the American Revolution (1943) as an example of American Whig sentiment before the war. Philip Foner picked it up in his History of the Labor Movement in the United States (1947), crediting the sentiment to “Sons of Liberty.” Charles O. F. Thompson included the line in A History of the Declaration of Independence: A Story of the American Patriots who Brought about the Birth of Our Nation (1947), curiously tossing in the word “blessed” ahead of “Tory.” Other books followed.

From there it appears that an author or authors decided that “Sons of Liberty” meant Samuel Adams. In the current century several books and authoritative websites attribute the statement to Adams, usually saying “often quoted” or “reported to have said” as a signal that the writers can’t find the words in those four volumes of Writings. In several places the quotation has also lost the article “the” before “Ladies.”

In conclusion, while it’s definitely possible to quote the line “with the Ladies on our side, we can make every Tory tremble” from the Revolutionary era, it should be tentatively attributed to Jeremy Belknap, not Samuel Adams.

“His hat and clothes were covered with tea dust”

The Rev. Dr. John Prince (1751–1836, shown here) had an unusual path to the pulpit, and an unusual sideline afterward.

He was apprenticed and trained as a tinsmith and pewterer in Boston before entering Harvard at age twenty-one, several years older than a typical undergraduate of the time. After college and a master’s degree, Prince became a minister for Salem’s First Meeting.

Prince’s early practical training allowed him to become an expert on scientific instruments in the early republic. He invented, produced, evaluated, brokered, and repaired apparatus for several institutions, including his alma mater.

Back while he was an undergraduate, Prince was a close witness of the Boston Tea Party and its aftermath. He preserved his recollections of the event in a letter published in the Salem Gazette on 24 Sept 1833:

Mr. Editor,—There is a mistake in the Salem Mercury of last Wednesday, where, in speaking of the tea, it is said “there is a venerable Clergyman in Salem who took a part in the tea frolic, and assisted in emptying the chests into the sea”—

As there is but one clergyman now in Salem, who was a boy old enough to have assisted in the destruction of the tea at that time, viz. Dec. 16, 1773, it is evident who is meant by the “venerable Clergyman,” and he sends you this note to correct the mistake, and inform you that he was only a quiescent spectator of the transaction, and had no hand in destroying the tea. He stood upon the quarter deck of the vessel, leaning over the rail which crossed the deck, while the persons, disguised as Indians, were unloading her, and could plainly see what was doing, though it was principally in the evening.

Two men stood at the hatchway on the main deck, with axes in their hands, and as the chests were hoisted out of the hold they knocked off the tops and emptied the tea into the dock, and threw the chests after it. The tide was out, and the tea was piled up on the flats by the side of the ship as high as her gunwales.

The boy, as the Clergyman is called, was then more than 22 years old, and was not “an apprentice at that time.” He crossed the vessel’s deck in going on shore, and so much of the tea was scattered on it as to be over his shoes, which he found full when he got home; and his hat and clothes were covered with tea dust as a miller is with meal in his mill.

He went on to the wharf the next morning, where a great concourse of people was assembled to view what had been done the night before, (by the Mohawk Indians, it was said). Amongst the people assembled was the old British Admiral, ([John] Montague) who looked with astonishment on the scene of devastation, and said, the Devil is in this people, for they pay no more respect to an act of the British parliament, which can make England tremble, than to an old newspaper, and then went off of the wharf.

In the morning after the tea was thrown overboard the ebb tide carried most of it away, and the empty chests were seen floating down the harbor on the Dorchester shore in a line, extending to the castle. The business of destruction of the tea was conducted without any tumult or great noise; nor was any damage done to the vessel, or to any other effects whatever. The writer of the above knew several of the Indians who did the patriotic work.

Although the Salem Gazette didn’t print Prince’s name with this letter, the Gloucester Telegraph reprinted it on 28 September and blew his anonymity. Prince wrote several more reminiscences of the Revolutionary period for the Salem Gazette, their authorship not confirmed until his death notice.

This 1833 letter put Adm. Montagu at Griffin’s Wharf while complaining about the locals on the morning of 17 Dec 1773, as I discussed yesterday.

As part of its program to mark the graves of seemingly all known, suspected, rumored, or claimed Tea Party participants, the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum has included Prince as an “honorary participant.” I think that’s more than fair, given that he was actually on board one of the ships and would surely have faced criminal charges if there had been a royal police force to break up the action.

“Ye. uncommon size & penetration of his genius”

When the Locke family returned to Sherborn, after the Rev. Dr. Samuel Locke resigned as president of Harvard College (because he’d fathered a child with his housekeeper), they had a nice home waiting for them.

The Lockes owned a “large convenient Dwelling-House” situated “near the Northerly side of the Common on the road to Holliston” and “opposite the Meeting-House.”

The attached estate included “two Barnes, and other Out-Houses,” and ninety-two acres of land, including “Pasturage, Arable land, Meadow, &c with a large quantity of good Fruit Trees; as also a valuable Lot of Wood.”

There had been some hurt feelings when Locke had left Sherborn’s pulpit in 1769, but the congregation found a replacement within a year, with the college providing some settlement money. The townspeople didn’t seem to hold a grudge against Locke personally.

In fact, Locke’s neighbors continued to refer to him with the honorifics “Reverend” and “Doctor.” In March 1774 they voted to put him on the committee of correspondence, which after the war started became the committee of public safety.

To supplement his income, Locke prepared boys for Harvard, having them board at his house. One student, John Welles, recalled him as “the most learned man in America,” and “a perfect gentleman, dignified.”

The Continental Journal for 22 Jan 1778 reported: “Thursday morning last [i.e., 15 January] died suddenly of an apoplectic fit, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Lock of Sherburn.” According to John Goodwin Locke’s Book of the Lockes, “He died from the bursting of a blood-vessel, when aiding in driving some cattle from his field.” (Sherborn’s published town records say the date was 15 Jan 1777, but apparently someone forgot to start writing the new year. That error confused later people, like the person who carved the headstone shown above.)

Contemporaries glossed over Locke’s adultery. A neighbor wrote: “Some domestic troubles embittered the last years of his life, but he was never known to make a complaint, but bore them with Christian resignation.” His successor at Harvard, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Langdon, is credited with this eulogy:

In Memory of ye. Revd. Samuel Locke D. D. [sic]

As a Divine he was learned and judicious—In ye. pastoral relation vigilant and faithfull—as a christian devout & charitable—In his friendships firm & sincere—humane affable & benevolent in his disposition—in ye. conjugal & parental relations kind, & officious—ye. uncommon size & penetration of his genius—ye. extensiveness of his erudition—yt. fund of useful knowledge wh. he had acquired—ye. firmness & mildness of his temper & manners—his easiness of access & patient attention to others-join’d with his singular talents for government, procur’d him universal esteem, especially of ye. governers & students of Harvard College over wh. he PRESIDED four years with much reputation to himself & advantage to ye. public—after wh. he retired to ye. private walks of Life, entertaining & improving ye. more confined circle of his friends until his Death wh. was very sudden on ye. 15th: day of January 1778—aged 45.

For the president of a college Locke had embarrassed by having an affair to say he was in “conjugal & parental relations kind, & officious” suggests that some contemporaries shared John Andrews’s opinion that his wife had somehow driven him into the arms of his housekeeper. But Mary Locke left no account herself, and no one else commented on her.

Be that as it may, Locke left an estate worth over £3,600. The widow Locke continued to live in Sherborn and to raise their three children. There’s an advertisement for settling her estate in the 11 June 1789 Independent Chronicle.

Of Mary and Samuel Locke’s children, Samuel, Jr., became the local doctor. He married Hannah Cowden, and they had four daughters, one dying in infancy. He died in 1788, aged twenty-seven, thus probably before his mother.

In 1792 the Locke family farm was put up for sale. The sellers were the couple’s daughter Mary, the doctor’s widow Hannah, and Samuel Sanger, the same man who had administered the widow’s estate. It evidently did not sell because in 1794 the widow Hannah Locke advertised it again, now on her own.

Mary Locke the daughter died in 1796, aged thirty-three. The family historian wrote: “She had been an invalid for some years before she died.” He also stated: “She was a lady of considerable personal and mental attractions, and if we may judge from the wardrobe which she left, not inattentive to that personal adornment to which many of her sex are addicted.” That judgment seems to be based entirely on the number of gowns in her probate inventory.

The youngest sibling, John Locke, moved from Sherborn to Union, Maine, and then to “Northampton, where he died, as it is said, by drinking cold water when heated.” That death wasn’t so sudden, however, as to preclude seeking medical attention and writing a will. John Locke was only thirty-four years old, continuing the family tradition of dying young.

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Locke’s grave went unmarked for decades. A sexton found his skeleton in 1788 when he was burying the eldest son. By 1853 the former minister’s remains had been dug up and reinterred in a new town cemetery. At the time his skull was judged to show “those phrenological developments which indicate great mental powers.”

When the younger Mary Locke died in 1796, both the Sherborn town records and the local Moral and Political Telegraphe newspaper described her as the minister’s “only daughter,” making a point. According to Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, however, the child Samuel Locke fathered in 1773 was also a girl, named Rebecca Locke. Clifford K. Shipton wrote that “she became a well-known figure in Boston and Worcester,” but I haven’t unearthed any sign of her.

Three Talks on the Tea Party

People are talking about the Boston Tea Party more and more. Here are three upcoming talks tied to its sestercentennial, all featuring history professors who have written books on the event.

Wednesday, 6 December, 1:00 P.M.
Online via the Congregational Library & Archives
Boston Tea Party at 250: Congregationalists and the American Revolution

Prof. Robert J. Allison of Suffolk University and Dr. Tricia Peone, director of the New England’s Hidden Histories Project, discuss documents in the host institution’s collection related to the Tea Party.

The destruction of the tea was one of the greatest acts of civil disobedience of all time, and the event that precipitated the Revolution. What was the political and religious background to the event?

Register here to tune in to this online discussion here.

Monday, 11 December, 6:00 P.M.
Old South Meeting House
Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776

Prof. James Fichter of the University of Hong Kong marks the publication of his new book Tea with a conversation with Dr. Nathaniel Sheidley, President and CEO of Revolutionary Spaces.

Fichter challenges the prevailing wisdom around the tea protests and boycotts by showing that tea and British goods continued to be widely sold and consumed in North America, and even a significant portion of the tea that the East India Company shipped in 1773 wound up in American teapots.

Books will be available for purchase an signing. This program is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Doors will open at 5:30, and light refreshments will be available.

Wednesday, 13 December, 6:30–8:30 P.M.
via the American Revolution Institute
Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America

In 2010, Prof. Benjamin L. Carp of Brooklyn College published the first full study of the Boston Tea Party in a generation. He returns to the event, examining the actions of those who carried out the raid in the context of the global story of British interests in India, North America, and the Caribbean.

People in Washington, D.C., can attend this event at the deluxe Anderson House on Massachusetts Avenue. Folks elsewhere can sign up to watch online.