The Latest on the Adams Academy

Last August I wrote about John Adams’s bequest to the town of Quincy intended to create a school, which would become owner of his extensive library, and a church.

As I reported then, it took decades for the Adams Academy to be built, and it never actually housed Adams’s books. Those books were sent to the new Boston Public Library in 1893, an act widely reported as a “gift” from the city of Quincy.

After the academy closed, other organizations used its stone building, most recently the Quincy Historical Society. The Adams Temple and School Fund remained, eventually charged with benefiting a nearby school. The city’s management of those assets became a subject of litigation in this century, and eventually the courts told Quincy to pay the school $2 million.

What prompted my posts was a proposal by Quincy mayor Thomas Koch to turn the Adams Academy building into a John Adams Presidential Library. Not the type of presidential library that houses a former President’s papers, since those are at the Massachusetts Historical Society, but Mayor Koch did ask the Boston Public Library to send back Adams’s books.

My South Shore friend Patrick Flaherty just sent me a Quincy Patriot Ledger article reporting the latest developments in this story. In December the Massachusetts court system ruled that the Adams Academy is the property of the Adams Temple and School Fund, not the city of Quincy. That fund’s trustee thus had the legal right to sell the building and land for the benefit of the surviving school.

Mayor Koch then announced that Quincy would exercise its power of eminent domain, buying the Adams Academy and two nearby properties for a “fair market price.” The city’s most recent assessments of the three buildings total to almost $4.1 million. However, since the neighboring properties were going to be redeveloped into larger buildings containing more than sixty residences, that could well affect their market value.

The Quincy city council’s finance committee just approved a plan, already approved by the Community Preservation Commission, to spend $9 million from the Community Preservation Act to settle the lawsuit, buy the three properties, and presumably pay legal fees. The immediate goal appears to be preventing that development around the academy building. What will become of the building is still up in the air.

The city’s current plan, which still needs a full council vote, doesn’t cover the creation of a presidential library. Not all the councilors who approved spending the $9 million are on board for spending more on that idea. For his part, the mayor told the newspaper, “I don’t expect to build that with city money.” 

Mounting Expenses for Four Towns

This posting continues the analysis of a 3 Feb 1775 letter that I started quoting yesterday, from men in four different towns to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s committee of safety.

Yesterday’s extract shows the letter was about eight cannon purchased by William Molineux in Boston in the fall of 1774. Somehow the Patriots got those guns out to Watertown. And then…

…and after Some time Information was given yt it was desired that Watertown & the Neighboring Towns would mount them & git them Ready for emediate Service which is now Nearly Compleated (Viz, two by Watertown, two by Concord two by Lexington, & two by Weston[)],…

The Patriots weren’t just spreading those cannon around to make them harder for the British army to confiscate them. They were also spreading around the heavy expense of mounting and equipping those guns so they could be used in battle.

Artillery pieces themselves were big metal tubes, with a wide hole at one end and a very narrow hole near the other. On board ships and in shore batteries and fortifications, they were mounted on heavy, solid, small-wheeled carriages, and most if not all of those had been left behind.

To become ”field-pieces” suitable for a moving army, those cannon needed to be mounted on large-wheeled carriages that were both strong and maneuverable. Gun crews also needed rammers, swabs, worms, and other tools for loading and maintaining those guns. To “git them Ready for emediate Service” would require the best work of wheelwrights, blacksmiths, carpenters, and other craftsmen.

On 17 October, the Watertown town meeting considered the challenge:

Then the Question was put whether the town will mount & Equip two pieces of Cannon now lodged in the Town at their own Charge and it past in the affeirmative.—

Then it was Voted to Choose three persons a Committe to git Said work don

The cost “to git Said work don” became an issue. The selectmen called another town meeting on 21 November to consider how “to Grant money to pay for the two Carriages to the two pieces of Cannon that were ordered to be procured at the Expence of the town.” The men of Watertown voted to allocate £20 for those carriages, and only £15 for their schools.

Concord followed a similar course, as its town records (transcript now online) show. On 15 October the selectmen called a meeting with the top item being: “To See if the Town will Mount the Cannon brout into this Town by the Committee of Correspondance, and also Provide ammunition for Said Cannon agreeable to the Request of Said Committee.”

That meeting took place on 24 October, and the townspeople agreed that “the Selectmen take the Care that the Cannon brought into this Town by the Committee of Correspondance be Mounted at the Expence of the Town and that there be provided one hundred pound weight of Cannon Ball 4 pound Each Ball, and two hundred weight of Grape Shot, and Seven half Barrels of powder.” How was Concord to pay for all that? From tax revenues collected by the town constables but not yet forwarded to the provincial treasurer, Harrison Gray.

Lexington held its vote early the next month, as Alexander Cain has recounted:

On November 3, 1774, the town selectmen relented and announced the issue would be addressed at the next town meeting. Specifically, “Upon a request of a numbre of Inhabitants to see if the Town will fetch two small pieces of cannon from Watertown, offered by said Town for the use of the Company in this Towne.”

A week later, the town approved the purchase of two guns. “Voted. . . to bring the two pieces of Cannon (mentioned in the warrant) from Watertown & mount them, at the at the Town charge.”

After approving the purchase of two cannons, in true Yankee fashion, the residents voted to create a committee to explore the cheapest methods of mounting of the guns on carriages and building of ammunition boxes. “That a Comtee of three persons go to Watertown & see what the cost of mounting sd pieces will be & whether the carriages cannot be made by work men in this town”

Lexington men didn’t go to Watertown and actually pick up those guns until after 28 November, though.

Weston’s published town records recorded only one meeting in all of 1774, on 13 January. With militia colonel Elisha Jones in the chair, the town voted “by a very great majority” to reject the idea of forming a committee of correspondence. And yet, by the end of the year, Jones had fled into Boston as a Loyalist and the man who had made that proposal was overseeing two cannon at the expense of the town.

TOMORROW: The signatories.

(The picture above shows the Watertown meetinghouse, site of town meetings.)

“I was requested by my Father to go to the Stable”

As I described yesterday, in 1791 Duncan Ingraham asked the Massachusetts government to compensate him for property taken from him before the Revolutionary War.

Specifically, Ingraham wanted to be paid for “four, four pound iron Cannon of the value ninety six pounds.” (A “four pound” cannon didn’t weigh or cost four pounds; rather, it shot a cannonball that weighed four pounds.)

To support that claim, Ingraham attached an affidavit from dry goods merchant John Molineux (1753-1794) which said:

I John Molineux of Boston in the County of Suffolk & Commonwealth of Massachusetts, declare, that according to the best of my remembrance, some time in the Month of October in the Year 1774, I was requested by my Father to go to the Stable, belonging to the House of Capt. Ingraham at West Boston, with two Teams, & take from thence two Pair Cannon, which was accordingly done, & conveyed into the Country, & beleive they were taken by Authority

Molineux’s father was the hardware merchant William Molineux, who had been at the forefront of the Boston resistance, pushing into confrontations, since about 1767. Ingraham was thus the second Boston businessman, after Joseph Webb, to formally claim that William Molineux had taken cannon from him for the use of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.

That October 1774 date is significant. The congress convened for the first time on 7 October. Then delegates debated how best to oppose the royal authorities. Not until 20 October did the shadow legislature formally take up the question of “what is necessary to be now done for the defence and safety of the province,” and it took another week before the body appointed a committee to start buying military supplies.

That means Molineux was collecting cannon—which have no peacetime use—for the Provincial Congress before that legislature officially voted to prepare for war. We know Molineux must have acted before that 27 October vote because he died on 22 October.

Nonetheless, in 1792 the official state legislature paid Duncan Ingraham for his four iron cannon, recognizing that they had become part of the Patriots’ artillery force. Molineux probably jumped the gun, or in fact several guns, but retroactively the government agreed that he’d acted “by Authority.”

TOMORROW: How much money did Ingraham get?

(The image above is a handwriting specimen that John Molineux produced in the 1760s for his writing-school master, Abiah Holbrook, now in the Harvard University library collection.)

Exploring Benjamin Lincoln’s Life in Hingham

This afternoon the Hingham Historical Society launches its new season of lectures with the theme “Benjamin Lincoln’s World: Stories from Colonial Hingham to the Early Republic.”

The society is in the process of acquiring Gen. Benjamin Lincoln’s house, a National Historic Landmark that has been owned by one family for eleven generations (shown here).

These online talks are designed to explore Lincoln’s life and work in the Revolution, and to raise interest and funds for turning the house into a house museum. There are seven lectures scheduled through May 2021 and a self-guided walking tour.

Here are the first two events:

Sunday, 27 September, 3:00 P.M.
“Benjamin Lincoln and the American Revolution: A Conversation with David Mattern”
Andy Hoey, Head of Social Studies for the Hingham Public Schools, will interview David Mattern, Gen. Lincoln’s biographer and the recently retired editor of the Papers of James Madison.

Sunday, 25 October, 3:00 P.M.
“The Evolution of Benjamin Lincoln’s Lifelong Home”
J. Ritchie Garrison, Ph.D., former Director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware, will lead an architectural examination of the Benjamin Lincoln House.

Further lectures will discuss Hingham and the slave trade, colonial schooling, beer-making, women’s lives in early New England, and eighteenth-century lighthouses.

The self-guided walking tour “Getting to Know Benjamin Lincoln’s Neighborhood” will debut on the web in October. It will describe downtown Hingham structures that would have been standing in the general’s lifetime and the families who lived there.

Access to the full series of seven online lectures costs $200, or $175 for Hingham Historical Society members. One can order gift subscriptions, memberships, or copies of David Mattern’s book from the same webpage. Unlike some other online talks, I don’t expect these to be available on the web for free soon, so don’t sleep on this subscription! (That’s a little narcolepsy joke in Gen. Lincoln’s honor.)

“The most appropriate and useful place for the collection”

Yesterday I quoted John Adams’s deed donating his library to the town of Quincy.

The former President also granted the town some of the land he owned to build an academy, where the library was supposed to go, and a new Congregational church.

In February 1827 the Massachusetts General Court approved the incorporation of the Adams Temple and School Fund to oversee the property and investments, collect more money, and bring Adams’s vision to reality.

Adams was clear in his final deed about what his priorities were:

Though I presume not to dictate to the town, yet it is my wish, that the building of the Academy and the establishment of a classical master should be provided for before the Temple, of which I see no present necessity…

For Adams, the resources ideally were to go toward the school, presumably the library inside it, and finally the church. There was already, after all, a serviceable meetinghouse.

Instead, the new church was built from local granite and opened in 1828, two years after Adams died. It is now known as the “Church of the Presidents” since both he and his son John Quincy Adams attended services and were buried there.

The Adams Academy took a lot longer to raise money for. John Adams’s grandson Charles Francis Adams finally saw it become reality in 1872. Four years later, there were 140 boys studying there.

But that school ran into competition from both older academies and newer public and parochial high schools. The Adams Academy closed in 1908. The stone building then hosted other civic and charitable organizations. Since the 1970s it’s been the headquarters of the Quincy Historical Society.

In the mid-nineteenth century, John Adams’s books were housed at various places around Quincy, including the town hall. During this time, a rare copy of Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan disappeared from the collection while autograph hunters cut Adams’s signature out of others. In 1882 the fund’s trustees chose to locate the library not at the academy but in the town’s new Thomas Crane Public Library.

But that arrangement didn’t last, either. In 1893 the Boston Public Library was designing a grand new building in the Back Bay. The president of its trustees wrote to the supervisors of the Adams Temple and School Fund about their thoughts on the John Adams Library:

They are so impressed with the great interest and historical value of the collection that they feel it will not be out of place to ask you if it is not possible to place it in some position where it would be more accessible to the students to whom it would be useful. . . .

As the new Public Library building in Boston is nearing completion, it has occurred to the Trustees that the most appropriate and useful place for the collection would be in that building, where it would be of great use to a great number of students who resort to the Boston Public Library from all parts of the country, and where its value would be increased by the convenience of using it in connection with the large collection on kindred subjects already collected, and where it might also serve as a nucleus for one of the most important constitutional libraries in the United States.

According to Lindsay Swift of the B.P.L., in Quincy the Adams collection “was practically unused for it was of a character little calculated to interest readers in a small community.” What’s more, the larger library’s trustees offered “a separate alcove with a suitable inscription over it” if the books came to Boston.

In November 1893, the Adams Temple and School Fund supervisors decided that “the intent of President Adams would be better carried out by placing the Library where it would be more accessible to students and investigators,” in the words of Charles Francis Adams, Jr. They approved the transfer of the volumes into the new Boston building.

Reports on this transfer, such as in the 17 Dec 1893 Boston Herald, referred to it as a “gift” from the fund to Boston’s future library. At the same time, the fund’s official resolution still referred to those books of John Adams as “the Library belonging to the city of Quincy.” So what institution had legal claim to the old President’s books?

TOMORROW: A call from Quincy in 2020.

When John Adams Gave Away His Library

In the summer of 1822, John Adams was feeling generous toward his home town and considering his legacy. The ex-President was then eighty-six years old.

On 25 June, Adams deeded to the town of Quincy two tracts of land to fund a stone “Temple” for the town’s Congregational Society, under certain conditions. On 8 July, a town meeting accepted that gift.

On 25 July, President Adams deeded more land to build a stone schoolhouse for an academy. He noted that his long-gone colleagues John Hancock and Josiah Quincy, Jr., had grown up in part on that land. On 6 August, the town accepted that gift and its conditions.

Finally, on 10 August the former President made a third gift:

KNOW all Men by these Presents, That I, John Adams, of Quincy, in the County of Norfolk, Esquire, in further consideration of the motives and reasons enumerated in my two former Deeds, do hereby give, grant convey and confirm to the inhabitants of the town of Quincy in their corporate capacity, and their successors, the fragments of my Library, which still remain in my possession, excepting a few that I shall reserve for my consolation in the few days that remain to me, on the following conditions, viz.

Condition first, That a Catalogue of them be made, recorded in the town books and printed, together with the three Deeds, in sufficient numbers to perpetuate the remembrance of them.

Condition second, That those books be deposited in an apartment of the building to be hereafter erected for a Greek and Latin School or Academy.

Condition third, That these books be placed under the direction of the five gentlemen mentioned in my former deeds as supervisors of the Temple and School Fund, with the addition of the Rev. Mr. [John] Whitney and the successive settled Ministers of the Congregational Society, and also of the future settled Ministers of the Episcopal Society, while they shall remain such.

Condition fourth, That none of the books shall ever be sold, exchanged or lent, or suffered to be removed from the apartment, without a solemn vote of a majority of the superintendents.

Condition fifth, The books may be removed to any place the Committee of the town shall direct, or remain where they are, at the pleasure of the Committee of the town; locked up and the keys held by the Committee during my life, and the pleasure of my Executors afterwards.

Article sixth, I make no condition of this, but submit it to the consideration of the town whether it may be expedient to build the Temple on the Hancock Lot near the Academy? Nothing would be a higher gratification to me or more honorable to my memory; and I could wish that the triangle on which the present Temple stands should be left forever as a common Training Field, and for other accommodations of the inhabitants of the town.

Article seventh, Though I presume not to dictate to the town, yet it is my wish, that the building of the Academy and the establishment of a classical master should be provided for before the Temple, of which I see no present necessity, and I cannot think that this can ever be construed a deviation from the plan and intentions of the Donor, notwithstanding any thing in the two former deeds; and if any descendant of mine should ever presume to call it in question, I hereby pronounce him unworthy of me; and I hereby petition all future Legislators of the Commonwealth to pass a special law to defeat his impious intentions, and this I think can never be adjudged an Ex post facto law.

Article eighth, It is not my intention or desire to make any condition of what follows; but I ask leave to suggest to the town the propriety of applying the income of the Coddington School lands to the uses of this Academy, and to give authority to the superintendents of the Library to apply such parts of it, as they shall judge expedient, to the purchase of books annually to augment and increase this Library. Those books to be kept by themselves in separate alcoves to be denominated the Coddington Alcoves. That gentleman’s first residence was in this town, and he [William Coddington] was an honor to it. He was a man of large and liberal mind. He removed with the excellent Roger Williams to Rhode Island, and became the father, founder, and first Governor of that colony. This will be a proper memorial of respect and gratitude for that very ancient and noble donation.

Adams signed that document in the presence of his nephew William Smith Shaw and his late colleague’s son and grandson, now Josiah Quincy and Josiah Quincy, Jr.

The Quincy town meeting had already voted to authorize a committee to express thanks for “the gift of his very valuable library” on top of everything else.

A catalogue of Adams’s books was published in 1823 along the transcriptions of the deeds, town meeting resolutions, and other legal documents connected with his gift. That slim book listed 2,756 volumes in all. There were twenty-three pages of English books, nineteen pages of French books, five pages of Latin books, two of Greek, and two of Italian and Spanish. They were still in the former President’s possession as the committee worked on funding the academy and church.

TOMORROW: What happened to that library?

Another Boston Town Meeting, “all in very good order”

On 15 May 1770, 250 years ago today, Bostonians convened in Faneuil Hall for another town meeting session.

That gathering was meant to finish up some business from the week before, as discussed starting here, and the year before.

The first order of business was to hear from the school committee. At this time Boston didn’t have a regularly elected or appointed school committee. Instead, the seven selectmen invited a long list of leading gentlemen to accompany them as they visited the town’s five schools in early July, at the end of the regular school year.

In 1769 the committee included eight members of the Council, the four General Court representatives, the twelve Overseers of the Poor, ten ministers, and twenty-four other men, as shown here.

That committee probably watched the grammar school boys recite in Latin and/or Greek and observed the writing school boys’ handwriting samples. I don’t know whether all fifty-odd gentlemen went to each school or whether they broke out into teams.

That committee reported back to the town at this May meeting—ten months later, and a week after the town had approved the schoolmasters’ salaries. They told the citizens at Faneuil Hall that the gentlemen had

found the South Grammar School had 142 Scholars; the North Grammar School 60 Scholars; the South Writing School 203 Scholars; the North Writing School 253 Scholars; the Writing School in Queen Street 251 Scholars; all in very good order.

As I discussed back here, the system educated slightly over 200 grammar-school boys and more than 700 writing-school boys, but the town paid the masters of the grammar schools significantly more.

The town meeting then moved on to financial matters. A committee reported on its review of town treasurer David Jeffries’s accounts. Another committee reported on the accounts of the Overseers of the Poor. The meeting voted to raise £4,000 for poor relief in the coming year—a major expenditure, but not as large as in other years.

Then the big guns came out. The committee to instruct the town’s newly elected representatives to the Massachusetts General Court delivered its report of what issues those politicians should raise with the royal governor. Although the first man named to that committee was justice Richard Dana, a manuscript of its report survives in the handwriting of member Josiah Quincy, Jr., indicating that the young lawyer drafted the report. That was just weeks after Quincy had defended Ebenezer Richardson, and he was on the defense team for the Boston Massacre trials as well.

The document started by saying there was “great reason to believe, that a Deep laid & desperate plan of Imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty.” More specifically, the problems were “holding the General Court at Harvard College” (an ongoing that merited several long paragraphs of precedents and argument), “The despicable situation of our provincial militia,” and “the unwarrantable practise of ministerial instructions to the Commanders in Chief of this Province.”

As solutions, the committee sought measures “to increase population, incourage industry and promote our own manufactures”; a “firm and lasting union of the Colonies”; and an “endeavor to revive the antient method of appointing the Attorney General,” presumably not leaving that choice up to the royal governor.

The town meeting unanimously approved that lengthy report and asked that it be printed in the newspapers, confirming that it was a document for public consumption.

Finally, one of the Overseers of the Poor elected in March, Thomas Tyler, had died. This meeting quickly elected Samuel Abbott as a replacement. Then the citizens adjourned, thinking that they had done all the work they needed for a long while.

Fire Buckets and the Fenno Family

The Skinner auctioneers blog offers Christopher D. Fox’s detailed discussion of firefighting and leather fire buckets in Boston.

In particular, Fox profiles one maker of those buckets:

While there were certainly a number of merchants in Boston from whom fire buckets could be purchased, few seem to have advertised in the papers. In addition, it is very rare to find a mark or signature on a fire bucket that identifies its maker. As a result, the identities of nearly all of the makers of fire buckets around Boston have been lost. One exception to this are the buckets produced by John Fenno Jr.

John Fenno Jr. was born in Boston on May 4, 1732, to John Fenno (1707-1790) and Hannah Capen (1712-1792). He married Katherine Hodges (1729-1810) on April 4, 1755, and together they had six children. Fenno’s father worked in the leather business and it is likely that John learned the leatherworking trade from him. While it is not clear exactly when John Fenno Jr. began working on his own, an advertisement in the Massachusetts Centinel in April 1785 indicates that by then his business was well established. “John Fenno, jun. Hereby gives notice to those gentlemen who are so well disposed as to enter into Fire Societies, and all others, that he continues to make Leather Buckets, strong and neat, of a large size, and handsome shape. — Hoses for Engines, and Hoses for the West-India use — Boots, Gloeshoes, and Shoes of all sizes, at the sign of the Leather Bucket, next door to Dr. Samuel Curtis’s at the South End.” Fortunately for historians and collectors, Fenno’s fire buckets are identifiable as he marked his work with a rectangular stamp reading “I. FENNO” on the back of his buckets near the stitched seam.

Unfortunately, in the spring of 1787 his house burned and Fenno was forced to relocate his business as testified by a newspaper advertisement in May of that year. This advertisement is interesting in that beyond the text describing what he makes and sells, it illustrates two of his principal products; shoes and buckets. Over the next several years his business continued to flourish and he expanded his offerings to include hoses for firefighting equipment and other uses. In October 1794 Fenno placed the following advertisement in the Columbian Centinel: “John Fenno, Informs the Public, that he continues to make Leather Buckets, after the best manner, at the sign of the Bucket, Orange Street, South end, Boston. A number of Buckets may be had on the shortest notice. Said Fenno makes Hoses for Engines, and Hose for the conveyance of Oil and Molasses on board vessels.” Fenno apparently continued his bucket-making business until his death on December 5, 1812.

Fenno’s next-younger brother, Ephraim (1734-1790), also became a leather-dresser in Boston. He turned “melancholy” in the late 1780s, was admitted to the almshouse in November 1788, and died there, as tracked in his son’s letters (P.D.F. download).

John and Ephraim’s uncle Benjamin Fenno (b. 1719) might have been the man who looked after the town granary before the Revolutionary War. That granary eventually was taken down to built the Park Street Church, but it left its name on the neighboring burying-ground.

The next generation of the Fenno family left a literary trail. The bucket-maker John Fenno’s daughter born in 1765 is variously called Janet, Jennet, Jenny, and Jane. As Jenny Fenno and then as Jane Ames, she published three volumes of religious verse, as I discussed here. Here’s a look at her 1805 volume for sale.

Ephraim had a son named John Fenno (1751-1798), who assisted Abiah and then Samuel Holbrook at the South Writing School. After the war and some unsuccessful shopkeeping he became the publisher and editor of the Gazette of the United States, the Federalist Party organ in the nation’s capital (first New York and then Philadelphia). He died of yellow fever, far from Boston.

Studying the Schoolmasters’ Salaries

Toward the end of their 8 May 1770 town meeting, Bostonians turned to approving salaries for the town’s schoolteachers.

There were five town schools—two grammar or Latin schools and three writing schools. However, not all the teachers were compensated equally. Here are the salaries for the masters at each school:

• John Lovell, South Latin School (shown here): £120.
• Samuel Hunt, North Latin School: £100.
• John Proctor, Queen Street Writing School: £100.
• Samuel Holbrook, South Writing School: £100.
• John Tileston, North Writing School: £100.

Obviously, the town valued John Lovell’s services significantly more than any other master. There were a number of factors, including his long tenure at the South Latin School and how that school was twice as large as the North Latin School. But the town always spent more on the grammar schools.

The disparity was even more pronounced when we add in the salaries that the meeting approved for each assistant master or usher:

• James Lovell, usher, South Latin School: £60, plus £40 “as an encouragement for him to remain and exert himself in the Service of the Town the ensuing Year.”
• James Carter, usher, Queen Street Writing School: £50, plus £25 for encouragement.
• Assistant for the South Writing School, to be named later: £50.
• Assistant for the North Writing School, to be paid through Tileston: £34.

Tileston’s assistant was William Dall, who turned seventeen years old in 1770. He was still an apprentice and thus worth only two-thirds of a regular usher’s salary.

At the South Writing School, Samuel Holbrook had become master partway through the school year after the death of his uncle Abiah, but he’d taught at the Queen Street School years before. His assistant might have been John Fenno, born in in 1751 and thus also still under age.

James Carter was an experienced teacher who would take over the Queen Street Writing School in a couple of years, which is probably why the town offered him “encouragement” to stay on the job.

But Boston really encouraged James Lovell at the South Latin School, paying him as an usher as much money as every master but his father. He was a Harvard graduate working under his father, and people might have felt he was turning away better prospects. Indeed, later that year, the congregation at Christ Church invited Lovell to preach during a dispute with their pastor, the Rev. Mather Byles, Jr.

That disparity in spending on the different schools becomes even more stark when we look at the number of children each of those schoolteachers served. Here’s how many scholars a town committee found at each school a couple of months later in 1770:

• South Latin School, 137 boys.
• North Latin School, 56 boys.
• South Writing School, 231 boys.
• Queen Street Writing School, 268 boys.
• North Writing School, 250 boys.

Even without an usher at the North Latin School, the town was paying £320 to give 193 boys a grammar-school education (or, really, part of one since about two-thirds of each entering class dropped out without finishing). That’s per-pupil spending of £1.66.

Meanwhile, the town was spending £459 to educate the other 749 boys in the practical skills of handwriting and arithmetic. That was £0.61 per pupil.

Clearly the system favored the students at the Latin Schools, most of them coming from the town’s richer families. Though Boston prided itself on its public schools, the system wasn’t equitable. (And about half of the boys in town of school age weren’t in the public schools at all. Not to mention no girls or black children.)

There was one more piece of business for Boston’s 8 May 1770 town meeting: to vote £100 to David Jeffries “for his Services as Treasurer of the Town the Year past, and for all his Expences in that Office.” Someone had to pay the schoolmasters.

“Impowred to order and require so many days’ work yearly”

Yesterday I mentioned how colonial Boston selectmen’s records periodically include lists of the free black men in the town in connection with, of all things, highway repairs. Here’s more about that.

Massachusetts militia laws excluded black and Native American men from drilling with the white men required to serve, presumably to avoid giving those men of color so much military training they could start an uprising. It’s possible that the social-gathering side of militia musters also played a role in this exclusion.

Since militia duty made free white men give up four days a year for the good of society, that society felt it was only fair to require free black men to give up four days as well. Therefore, in 1707 the Massachusetts General Court passed a law that said:

Whereas, in the several towns and precincts within this province, there are several free negro’s and molatto’s able of body and fit for labour, who are not charged with training, watchings and other services required of her majesty’s subjects, whereof they have share in the benefit,—Be it enacted…

That the selectmen of each town or precinct be and hereby are impowred to order and require so many days’ work yearly, of each free male negro or molatto, able of body, dwelling within such town or precinct, in the repairing of the highways, cleansing the streets, or other service, for the common benefit of the place, as, at the discretion of the selectmen, may be judged an equivalent to the services performed by others, as aforesaid.

The result was a form of tax levied only on free black men and extracted in the form of labor. Or it was a way to continue coercing labor, at least a little, from black men even after they became free.

In fact, this custom may have already been in place before that law made it official. On 26 Sept 1704 the Boston selectmen “Ordered that Mr. Timo. Wadsworth be desired to take Care of doing what is necessary in repaireing the High way on ye neck & that as many of the free negros & poor of ye Town may be imployed therein as Shall be convenient.” Perhaps that was free labor, perhaps the town expected those workers to be paid and specified “the free negros & poor” to ensure their asking price would be as low as possible.

On 16 June 1707, the selectmen moved to take advantage of unpaid labor under the new law. They ordered “each Free negro & mollatto man of this Town, forthwith to attend and perform four dayes Labour, abt. repaireing the Streets or Highwayes.” The town announced it could call on those men for more work if needed, “reserving their remayning Service untill further order.” A constable was empowered to summon the men, putting the force of law behind this requisition.

For the next couple of decades, lists of black and Native men and their work assignments, ranging from two days to twelve, periodically appeared in the selectmen’s records. It looks like men who got out of their obligation in one year were assigned more days the next. I found lists for 1708, 1710, 1711, 1712, 1714, 1715, 1716, 1718, 1719, and 1723.

At various towns the selectmen empowered any one of them to summon free black men and appointed “Capt. Hab. Savage,” Richard Hubburt, Eneas Salter, and others to oversee those workers. Specific assignments included “clearing the valt of ye. House of Easment [i.e., outhouse] belonging to the Free Lattin School in School Street.” But most of the work was repairing the main roads.

The 1725 list, the first to include a man named Onesimus, was unusual in giving only first names for the men being drafted. Usually there was more identifying information. Sometimes those names came with other notations like “dead“ or ”gon,” or remarks about how many days men had already worked or had left to do.

There was no list of laborers in 1736 or 1737, so on 30 Aug 1738 the selectmen directed ”Thomas Cowdrey…to take a List of the Free Negro’s, Indians, and Molatto’s in the Town that are capable of Service, and to lay it before the Select men, in order to their being Employ’d in the Service of the Town, according to law.” The list entered on 13 September contained twenty-one names, including Titus Rumney Marsh, John Woodby, and Onesimus Mather.

The town drafted free black workers again in 1743 and 1744, but the practice became less common over time. On 14 June 1759 the selectmen resolved:

Whereas there is Considerable Work to be done this year on Boston Neck, & the Free Negroes of the Town have been for Several Years exempted from any duty, therefore it was Some time past Voted that they be Orderd to attend the Selectmen, & on this day the following Negroes Attended

• Bristol Jeffries who will do what Work he is orderd to do—
• Pompey Blackman who agrees to pay half a dollar p. day for so many days as he shall be orderd—
• Liecester Black ditto—
• Dick Tynge to pay half a dollar as above—
• David Primus ditto—
• Homer Blackadore Sickly.

Some of the town’s free black men now had enough money to buy their way out of service in the same way white men could pay fines so as not to attend militia drill. (Though I’m not sure how often those fines were really collected.)

TOMORROW: How a custom died in Revolutionary Boston.

Onesimus Mather Unchristianized

In 1706 the Rev. Cotton Mather published a pamphlet titled The Negro Christianized: An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, the Instruction of Negro-Servants in Christianity.

Thirteen years before, Mather had published Rules for the Society of Negroes, encouraging the small but growing population of Africans in Boston to worship as Christians. He also gave money for reading lessons. At the same time, his pamphlets assured slaveholders that their human property could be baptized and still remain human property.

Mather’s wealthy parishioners, those most likely to own slaves, evidently thought he was just the man to become a slaveholder himself. In December 1706, the minister wrote in his diary:

This Day, a surprising Thing befel me. Some Gentlemen of our Church, understanding (without any Application of mine to them for such a Thing,) that I wanted a good Servant at the expence of between forty and fifty Pounds, purchased for me, a very likely Slave; a young Man, who is a Negro of a promising Aspect and Temper, and this Day they presented him unto me. It seems to be a mighty Smile of Heaven upon my Family; and it arrives at an observable Time unto me. I putt upon him the Name of Onesimus; and I resolved with the Help of the Lord, that I would use the best Endeavours to make him a Servant of Christ, and also be more serviceable than ever to a Flock, which laies me under such Obligations.

I can’t help but think that day contained even more surprises for the young men thereafter known as Onesimus. That name, meaning “useful,” been assigned to many enslaved men in the Roman Empire. Mather knew it best from the epistle to Philemon, in which Paul sent an escaped slave named Onesimus back to his master with an admonition for them both to do better.

Onesimus had been born in Africa, and Mather later described his people as “Guramantese,” most likely Coromantee from what is modern Ghana. What the young man’s original name was, how he came to Boston, what he thought of his new home—we know none of that.

Christianizing Onesimus proved to be harder than Mather expected. For one thing, the minister—all the while exploiting the man’s labor for his own family—believed he stole things. On 2 Dec 1711 Mather wrote:

I must keep a strict Eye on my Servant Onesimus; especially with regard unto his Company. But I must particularly endeavour to bring him unto Repentance for some Actions of a thievish Aspect. Herein I must endeavour that there be no old Theft of his unrepented of, and left without Restitution.

Yet Mather was also acceding to the man’s pressure for more autonomy. In 1712 he wrote:

Having allowed unto my Servant Onesimus, the conveniences of the Married State, and great Opportunities to get money for himself, I would from hence take occasion mightily to inculcate on him, his obligations to keep the Rules of Piety, and Honesty; and Particularly Charge him, to devote Part of his gains to Pious Uses.

The big surprise to Mather seems to have been that Onesimus was, well, smart. The only way the minister found he could affect his servant’s behavior (which suggests he tried other methods) was persuasion, as he wrote on 2 Aug 1713:

My Negro Servant is one more Easily govern’d and managed, by the Principles of Reason, agreeably offered unto him, than by any other methods. I would oftener call him aside, and assay to reason him into a good Behaviour.

Mather laid out a course of education on 2 Dec 1713:

There are several Points, relating to the Instruction and Management of my Servant Onesimus, which I would now more than ever prosecute. He shall be sure to read every Day. From thence I will have him go on to Writing. He shall be frequently Catechised. I would also invent some advantageous Way, wherein he may spend his Liesure-hours.

The minister enlisted other family members in this effort as well, writing in 1712 that after catechizing his children, “I also made one of them, to hear the Negro-Servant Say his Catechism.”

Mather treated any misfortune as an opportunity for theological education—any misfortune of Onesimus’s, that is:

• 2 Jan 1714: “My Servant burying of his Son, it gives me an Opportunity, to inculcate agreeable Admonitions of Piety upon him.”
• 20 Mar 1716: “My Servant has newly buried his Son; (Onesimus his Onesimulus). Lett me make this an Occasion of inculcating the Admonitions of Piety upon him.”
• 28 May 1717: “Onesimus’s Recovery from a dangerous Fitt of Sickness, must be improv’d for his Awakening to Piety.”

“Onesimulus” was a coinage meaning “Little Onesimus” in Latin. I presume Mather insisted on that name.

Despite all that effort, Onesimus never declared himself to be saved, asked to be baptized, or joined a congregation. In Mather’s eyes he remained unchristianized.

I should note that most of the times the Rev. Dr. Mather wrote of Onesimus’s faults he also chided himself for not having corrected those faults already. He was using his diary entries to prod himself into improving. And he was, after all, supposed to be an expert.

TOMORROW: Fighting the epidemic.

(For more on how the Rev. Cotton Mather wrestled with his servant Onesimus’s religious life, see Kathryn S. Koo’s “Strangers in the House of God” [P.D.F. download].)

“The Town make choice of a proper Person to deliver an Oration”

Yesterday I described how Bostonians commemorated the first anniversary of the Boston Massacre in 1771, including Dr. Thomas Young delivering a political oration in the Manufactory.

Six days later, on Monday, 11 March, Boston had its first town meeting of the year. As usual, attendees took up the first day with electing various officials, from the selectmen on down.

One agenda item on the second day was “Whether the Town will determine upon some suitable Method to perpetuate the memory of the horred Massacre perpetrated on the Evening of the 5. of March 1770—by a Party of Soldiers of the 29. Regiment.” Town leaders were getting on the commemoration bandwagon.

The meeting assigned that topic to a committee of active upper-class Whigs: John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Dr. Benjamin Church, Benjamin Kent, Richard Dana, Dr. Joseph Warren, and Samuel Pemberton. A second committee was chosen to vindicate the townspeople from “some partial and false publications” about the Massacre trials the previous fall.

The perpetuation committee returned on Tuesday, 19 March with this recommendation:

That for the present the Town make choice of a proper Person to deliver an Oration at such Time as may be Judged most convenient to commemorate the barbarous murder of five of our Fellow Citizens on that fatal Day, and to impress upon our minds the ruinous tendency of standing Armies in Free Cities, and the necessity of such noble exertions in all future times, as the Inhabitants of the Town then made, whersby the designs of the Conspirators against the public Liberty may be still frustrated–

And the Committee in order to compleat the Plan of some standing Monument of Military Tyrany begg’d to be indulged with further time

The meeting “Voted unanimously” to adopt that plan for an oration. (No “standing Monument of Military Tyrany” would be erected for more than a century.)

The next question was who should deliver the oration. Dr. Young already had a text, of course, but now that was old news, and possibly too radical as well. Instead, people proposed two possible orators:

• Samuel Hunt, master of the North Latin School
• James Lovell, longtime usher, or assistant master, of the South Latin School

The townspeople “as directed then withdrew and brought in their Votes.” Not only did James Lovell win, but he was “unanimously chosen.” (I wonder how Mr. Hunt took that. Maybe it was supposed to be an honor just to be nominated.)

The same committee, with the addition of Samuel Swift, was sent off to invite Lovell to speak at Faneuil Hall on Thursday, 2 April, at 10:00 A.M. In essence, this would be a special edition of the usual “Thursday Lecture,” or sermon, that one minister or another had delivered on Thursday mornings for years. But this oration would also be an official session of the town meeting.

As it happened, on 2 April such a big crowd came out to hear Lovell that the meeting had to officially adjourn from Faneuil Hall to the Old South Meeting-House, the largest enclosed space in town (shown above). Afterwards, the town asked for Lovell’s text so that it could print his oration and spread its message. You can read it here.

All of those steps became an annual ritual in Boston: the proposal in town meeting to commission an oration, the committee visiting a respectable young gentleman with a speaking invitation, the adjournment on 5 March (or 6 March if the anniversary fell on the Sabbath) to Old South, the town’s publication of the text. Even in 1776, when Boston was under siege, there was an oration for Bostonians in exile out in Watertown. That tradition lasted until 1783, after the Revolutionary War ended.

And it all started with the town meeting deciding to commemorate the Massacre one month after the first anniversary.

The Life and Death of Christopher Seider

The younger boy hit by “Swan shot” from Ebenezer Richardson’s musket on 22 Feb 1770 was named Christopher Seider (although that last name also showed up as Snider and in other forms).

Christopher’s story starts with an effort to settle Maine. Around 1740, Massachusetts land speculators recruited German-speaking immigrants to live in the area around Broad Bay now called Waldoboro. At first this community was very small, but immigrant-laden ships arrived in Boston harbor beginning in November 1751.

The 25 Sept 1752 Boston Evening-Post reported:

a ship arrived from Holland with about 300 Germans, men, women and children, some of whom are going to settle at Germantown [in Braintree] and the others in the Eastern parts of the Province [i.e., Maine]. . . . a number of very likely Men and Women, Boys and Girls, from Twelve to twenty-five years old, will be disposed of for some Years according to their Ages and the different Sums they owe for their Passage.

In other words, some of the younger immigrants were to be indentured servants.

On that ship, the St. Andrew, came Heinrich Seiter, a farmer from Langensteinbach, and his family. Their home country was ruled by Charles Frederick, Margrave of Baden-Durlach. He was among the more enlightened of Europe’s noble despots, but Seiter was “very poor” and sought better opportunities. In that family, it appears, was a young man named Georg Frederich Seiter, born in 1727.

Around the same time, a woman named Christine Salome Hartwick, born about 1723, arrived with several of her relatives. That family’s name showed up in New England records as Hardwick, Hartig, and other forms.

Heinrich Seiter settled in the Waldoboro area. George Seiter may have lived with him for a while or gone directly to Braintree, where locals were trying to develop a little manufacturing center. Some of the new Germans were said to be glassmakers, and Joseph Palmer and Richard Cranch were building a glass factory.

We know that Georg Frederich Seiter married Christine Salome (soon Sarah) Hartwick on 20 Mar 1753 at Germantown. They had three children in Braintree:

• Christina Elizabeth, born 26 Dec 1754.
• Sophia, born 29 June 1756.
• Christopher, baptized 18 Mar 1759.

By then the family name was written as “Sider.” If Christopher was baptized a week or two after birth, like his sisters, then he was born in early March 1759.

In 1755, the glass factory was struck by lightning and burned. Palmer and Cranch tried to keep the venture going, but in 1760 they gave up and mortgaged the land to Thomas Flucker. Some of the German workers went to Maine, some to a new town soon called Ashburnham—and George and Sarah Seider moved their family to Boston, where their daughter Mary was baptized at King’s Chapel on 10 June 1761.

The Seiders lived in a little house at the bottom of Boston Common on Frog Lane, later gentrified to Boylston Street. On the other side of the street was the giant elm that in 1765 the Sons of Liberty dubbed “Liberty Tree.”

As the 1760s came to a close, Christopher was no longer living with his family, however. He was in the household of the very wealthy widow Grizzell Apthorp, working as a servant. Apthorp was a pillar of the King’s Chapel congregation, which was probably how she came to know the Seiders.

There’s evidence that Christopher also attended a school of some sort. In the 1840s a woman named “Mrs. Preston” told a writer that she had gone to school with him, probably a reading school when they were younger. The Boston News-Letter reported that Christopher “was going from School” on 22 Feb 1770.

It’s quite clear that Christopher Seider was a reader. The Boston Evening-Post reported that he carried “several heroic pieces” or broadsides “in his pocket, particularly Wolfe’s Summit of human glory.” A broadside titled Major-General James Wolfe, who reach’d the summit of human glory, September 13th, 1759 is now on display at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The 17" by 24" sheet describes the taking of Québec in 1759, illustrated with a large colored woodcut of the general.

On the morning of 22 February, Christopher was among the boys outside Ebenezer Richardson’s house. It’s not clear how much he participated in the young mob’s attack on that house. Prosecutor Robert Treat Paine took notes that a witness named Jonathan Kenny said, “Syder threw nothing stood looking,” and “I was by Syder 5. minutes. Saw him throw nothing.” But Charles Atkins testified, “Syder was stooping to take up a Stone as I thought.”

Christopher must have been toward the front of the crowd when Richardson pulled his trigger because his torso was hit by eleven lead pellets. In addition, said the Boston Evening-Post, “The right hand of the boy was cruelly torn, whence it seems to have been across his breast.” Christopher fell and was carried into a nearby house.

The Evening-Post reported, “all the surgeons, within call, were assembled and speedily determined the wounds mortal.” Among the doctors we know examined the boy were the radical Dr. Thomas Young, the apothecary Dr. John Loring, and Dr. Joseph Warren, who afterward conducted an autopsy.

In addition, there were “clergyman who prayed with” Christopher. The newspaper praised “the firmness of mind he showed when he first saw his parents, and while he underwent the great distress of bodily pain, and with which he met the king of terrors.”

Christopher Seider died “about nine o’clock that evening.” Some reckonings say he was the first person killed in the American Revolution. He was probably just a few days short of his eleventh birthday.

TOMORROW: The older boy.

“Pointing to Mr. Jacksons Shop”

On Thursday, 8 Feb 1770, two and half centuries ago today, the Boston Whigs tried a new tactic in their pressure campaign against shopkeepers who were still selling imported goods.

According to the anonymous witness sending reports to Customs Collector Joseph Harrison:

about 10 oClock in the forenoon, a board was stuck up, on the Town pump, with a Hand painted on it, pointing to Mr. [William] Jacksons Shop and below, the word Importer, in Large Letters.—

Jackson’s braziery, or hardware shop, was on Cornhill, one of the main streets forming the crossroads at the center of town. His shop sign, the Brazen Head, had been a town landmark for decades. I can’t help but think that Bostonians also remembered how their town’s last great fire had started at his shop, which he then co-managed with his mother.

Whether it was his shop’s visibility or something he’d done, the Whig activists seem to have singled William Jackson out for hard treatment. He and they were already trading accusations of arson and planting evidence. Some printer produced the handbill shown above, visible at the Massachusetts Historical Society website. It designated Jackson and his shop by name and concluded:

It is desired that the SONS and DAUGHTERS of LIBERTY, would not buy any one thing of him, for in so doing they will bring disgrace upon themselves, and their Posterity, for ever and ever, AMEN.

But that wasn’t the most notable part of this protest, as the informant continued:

this affair drew the attention of the boys, and Country people, who flock’d about it, in great numbers; the Boys insulting Every body who went in, or out of the Shop, by Hissing and pelting them with Dirt.—

Boston’s five public schools let out early on Thursdays, at 10:00 A.M. That schedule was supposed to allow the boys to attend the Thursday Lecture (an extra sermon that Harrison Gray Otis recalled no classmate ever taking the opportunity to hear). Thus, the Whigs had small but enthusiastic adherents available to reinforce their message not to shop at Jackson’s.

Thursday was also Boston’s big market day, when farmers brought their produce in from the countryside. That produced an extra large crowd of people passing up Cornhill to Faneuil Hall.

According to the anonymous report:

Jackson made several attempts to take it [the pointing hand] Down, but was Repulsed by a Number of Idle people, who were standing by, with Clubs and Sticks in their Hands, however about one oClock it was taken away, by those who put it up, and the Crow’d dispersed first taking care to bespatter, all Jacksons windows over, with mudd and dirt—

During this Exhibition a Number of considerable Merchants Stood at a Little distance, and seemed highly pleased with what was going on, and Mr. M——x took Care to distinguish himself in a particular manner—

“Mr. M——x” was of course William Molineux, the Wolverhampton-born merchant who had made himself the leader of the non-importation movement. He was, people assumed, the strategist behind this new form of pressure.

Dublin Seminar to Look at “Living with Disabilities”

The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife has announced the subject of this year’s conference: “Living with Disabilities in New England, 1630–1930.”

The conference will be held in Deerfield, Massachusetts, on the weekend of 19-21 June 2020. The Dublin Seminar strives to be a meeting place for scholars, students, and committed avocational researchers. Professional development points are available for public school teachers who participate.

The Dublin Seminar is now accepting proposals for papers and presentations at this conference that address the history of people living with disabilities in New England and adjacent areas of New York and Canada from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. The principal topic examined by this conference is how children and adults with disabilities experienced disability in everyday life.

Proposals might address the following questions:

• How was disability defined during this period?
• How did gender, race, and class intersect with the experience and meaning of disability?
• What was the relationship between the law and disability?
• How did people with disabilities interact with institutions ranging from religious organizations to state-sponsored hospitals to schools?
• What is the history of disability within the context of military or industrial settings?
• How did people with disabilities interact with material culture and technology, including but not limited to assistive technologies such as artificial limbs and hearing aids; clothing; landscapes and buildings; and service animals?
• What is the relationship between medical history and disability history?

The Seminar encourages papers that reflect interdisciplinary approaches and original research, especially those based on material culture, archaeological artifacts, letters and diaries, vital records, federal and state censuses, as well as newspapers, visual culture, business records, recollections, autobiographies, and public history practice or advocacy at museums, archives, and elsewhere.

The “Living with Disabilities in New England, 1630–1930” conference will consist of approximately seventeen lectures of twenty minutes each. Selected papers will appear as the 2020 Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar to be published about eighteen months after the conference.

To submit a paper proposal for this conference, please submit (as a single email attachment, in Word or as a pdf) a one-page prospectus that describes the paper and its sources and a one-page vita or biography by 10 Mar 2020. Send proposals to dublinseminar@historic-deerfield.org.

“On Christmas-Day” in Fredericksburg

Sometime between 1745 and 1747, just a few years after the Gentleman’s Magazine published Elizabeth Teft’s poem “On Christmas-Day” (quoted yesterday), a teenager in Virginia copied it into a notebook.

That teenager was George Washington, and his copybook has of course become a precious national artifact.

Most of that volume was devoted to the texts of legal and business forms. After the one poem came a recipe for ink and the famous “Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour,” also copied from a British source.

In this blog post and his book George Washington: A Life in Books, Kevin J. Hayes strives mightily to find significance in how the young teen copied this poem. Unlike the way it appeared in the magazine, George capitalized all the nouns, which “reveals Washington’s fastidiousness”—or perhaps his tutor’s insistence.

As for the content, Hayes concludes the young man was “confident in his religious beliefs but pleased to have another confirm them.” Or perhaps someone told him to copy that poem.

At the time, George Washington was living at his late father’s slave-labor plantation called Ferry Farm, across the river from Fredericksburg, Virginia. The minister at St. George’s parish in that town was the Rev. James Marye, who had actually been born in France and educated for the Catholic priesthood before converting to the Church of England. Did he assign that poem as a handwriting exercise (and theological reminder) to the young planter’s son?

The Rev. Mr. Marye died in 1767, after Washington had grown up and moved away to Mount Vernon. The new rector at St. George’s parish was the old minister’s son, also the Rev. James Marye (1731-1780). According to David DeSimone of Colonial Williamsburg, he thought enough of “On Christmas-Day” to set Teft’s words to music sometime in the early 1770s.

“Charles has been guilty of a trick”

On 26 May 1786, John Adams wrote from London to his eldest son, congratulating John Quincy Adams on getting into Harvard College:

Give me leave to congratulate you on your Admission into the Seat of the Muses, our dear Alma Mater, where I hope you will find a Pleasure and Improvements equal to your Expectations. You are now among Magistrates and Ministers, Legislators and Heroes, Ambassadors and Generals, I mean among Persons who will live to Act in all these Characters.

If you pursue your Studies and preserve your Health you will have as good a Chance as most of them, and I hope you will take Care to do nothing now which you will in any future Period have reason to recollect with shame or Pain.

In the same letter, the U.S. of A.’s minister to Great Britain urged John Quincy to continue to be an example and mentor for his two younger brothers:

If your Brother Thomas is fitted, I hope he will enter, this Summer: because, he will have an Advantage in being one Year with you. My love to Charles. I hope he loves his Book. I have great dependence on you to advise your younger Brothers, and assist them in their Studies. You talk french I hope, with Charles, and give him a taste for french Poetry: not however to the neglect of Greek and Roman, nor yet of English.

Charles Adams was just finishing his first year at Harvard, and Thomas Boylston Adams was preparing to take the entrance examination.

Around the same time John Quincy received that letter, he caught his brother Charles snooping in his private papers. It’s not clear what Charles saw. John Q. had written about some potentially sensitive subjects in his diary that month:

• On 12 July he criticized the freshman class—Charles’s class—for feuding with the sophomores.
• He made multiple comments about the beauty of a young lady the brothers had met in Braintree.
• On 26 July he wrote crankily about not getting the dorm room he expected, blaming the change on a couple of other collegians. (John Q. went back to his diary and added a note, for himself and posterity, that those classmates weren’t to blame.)

Most likely Charles commented about one of those matters, and that alerted his older brother to his snooping.

On 27 July, John Q. started his diary entry this way:

I perceive Charles has been guilty of a trick which I thought he would despise; that of prying into, and meddling with things which are nothing to him: and ungenerously looking into Papers, (which he knew I wished to keep private,) because I could not keep them under lock and key. If he looks here, he will feel how contemptible a spy is to himself, and to others.

It looks like John Quincy never directly confronted his brother about the invasion of privacy. Instead, he left this passive-aggressive note for Charles to find the next time he went looking in the diary. That approach might suggest that John Quincy’s later admonitions to his brother about behaving better weren’t actually that direct.

John Adams returned to Massachusetts in 1788. On 16 July of that year, he wrote to his eldest child, Abigail Adams Smith:

I am happy to hear from all quarters a good character of all your brothers. The oldest has given decided proofs of great talents, and there is not a youth of his age whose reputation is higher for abilities, or whose character is fairer in point of morals or conduct. The youngest is as fine a youth as either of the three, if a spice of fun in his composition should not lead him astray. Charles wins the heart, as usual, and is the most of a gentleman of them all.

The returning diplomat wrote this letter after the Harvard Thanksgiving banquet of 1787, which ended with Charles being fined ten shillings. As we’ll see tomorrow, other members of the family had been discussing that event in person and in letters for months. Yet it appears John Adams didn’t know anything about it since he still heard “from all quarters a good character” of every son.

No one was telling Papa.

TOMORROW: “The riotous ungovernable spirit.”

Prof. Pearson’s “Journal of disorders”

In late December 1787, the Harvard College faculty did some house-cleaning. It was the end of an academic term, the end of the calendar year, and time to address some problems.

Early in the month the college president, professors, and tutors had fined more than thirty students for that disturbance on Thanksgiving. (Then they lifted the fines on the sophomores, because those students were contrite or because the upperclassmen obviously had more power and responsibility.)

At the end of the year the faculty took further action against four students involved in the Thanksgiving disorder, probably because they had all done other things as well. The educators decided that seniors Grosvenor and Wier deserved formal admonitions, and that juniors Emerson and Fayerweather should sit out the next semester.

(In addition, the Boston merchant Thomas Russell reported that he wanted his son Daniel to spend another semester studying in Weston, and the college gratefully agreed to that.)

While Charles Adams was still on the list of juniors who had to pay the ten-shilling fine, he didn’t receive any additional disciplinary attention that season. Evidently he was still keeping up his studies and not leading a completely “dissipated” life.

But Charles got into more trouble in his senior year, and for that we have an additional source beyond the official faculty records. The Harvard University Archives also hold a notebook headed “Journal of disorders &c.” kept by Eliphalet Pearson (1752-1826, shown here).

Pearson had graduated from Harvard College himself in 1773 and then gone into education, teaching in Andover’s town school. He made gunpowder for Massachusetts early in the war and then helped to found Phillips Academy in Andover. After heading that private school for several years, Pearson returned to Harvard in 1786 as Hancock Professor of Hebrew.

Prof. Pearson began his “Journal of disorders” on 4 Dec 1788. He maintained it until 1797, but The Harvard Book: Selections from Three Centuries, edited by William Bentinck-Smith (1982), says, “the most lengthy and frequent entries occurred during December 1788 and January 1789.” Those entries are transcribed here. Apparently the junior and lower classes were particularly restive that winter, and it would be good to know why.

Pearson’s journal is useful because it records more detail about incidents than is in the official faculty records, and it records some incidents that didn’t get into the official disciplinary process at all. And that’s where we can see Charles Adams celebrating his last semester in college a little too much.

COMING UP: A tavern, a snowball, and a naked undergraduate.